It's a visceral book and very visual. It's got little details that just take you there immediately. I don't know what it would be like for someone who doesn't know the history but to me, it feels like you're watching something happen before your eyes.
- Orlando Figes, Fivebooks.com
Bulgakov's love for Kiev at this time of the Russian civil war is reflected in two ways. There's a boyish love, a proud schoolboy fascination with its workings and its lights and its cosiness under the snow, and a sorrowful adult's love, looking down with a mixture of acceptance and bitterness at a great city being racked by fratricidal upheaval
- James Meek, Guardian
[Bulgakov] began as a journalist, and this served him well with <i>The White Guard</i>, whose prose is taut, concise, but lyrical too
- Doris Lessing,