It's amazing how the past actually has colors and wasn't a completely black and white world as I was led to believe from conventional photographs and films from that era. Really humanizes the past and makes it seem more close to the present. ( )

3.5 stars. I really enjoyed the colorised photos aspect of this book, but found the subjects a little hit and miss. Still worth reading though ( )

This was fascinating.

Color adds so much life to every photo here, making the subjects depicted accessible and present. With phenomenal work from the colorist Marina Amaral every photo looks amazing, like it’s been freshly-taken. Extensive captions also make for an illuminating read if a pretty heavy one at times (You’re still not sufficiently angry about colonialism? This book will rectify it).

An essential read for any history lover. ( )

The concept of The Colour of Time is simple, and yet so effective. We see the past as a foreign country, its visuals documented (if at all) in black and white photography. Why not, then, colourize those photos, and bring the richness of history – as the cliché goes – to life?

It works, often intoxicatingly well, in The Colour of Time, even if the simple concept is not so simple in execution. Self-taught Brazilian artist Marina Amaral researched extensively on the correct colours to use before painstakingly restoring the photographs. It is commendable dedication that provides rich results. Historical events learned by rote in textbooks become accessible when shown with blue skies and dark mud, particularly the earlier photos where the distance of time has done more to ossify them in our imaginations.

Look, for example, at the Crimean war artilleryman on page 33 who, if not for his ornate imperial uniform, could easily be a guy you meet down the pub. Or a young Thomas Edison (pg. 103), who looks like England striker Harry Kane. Duke Carlos (pg. 89), who looks like he works in IT and tweets insults about Trump, or the image – which went viral – of one of the conspirators in the Lincoln assassination plot (pg. 50), who looks like he is modelling for Calvin Klein. This is not novelty; it reminds you that these were real people, and these events – which we have accepted almost complacently – in fact really happened. Look at the colourized photograph of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (pg. 236), and see the sad, piercingly blue eyes that Gavrilo Princip saw when he started a war.

The book is sometimes, however, its own worst enemy. The effect of some of the photographs is lost by the unnecessary book design, with images spread out across two pages and disappearing into the recesses of the central binding. It is incredibly disappointing to see images that have been crafted with such care compromised by a huge fold running through them, ruining the panoramic effect and sense of awe which many of them should be creating.

It is also unfortunate to see the celebrity historian Dan Jones – who wrote the prose accompanying the images – cited so prominently above the young Marina Amaral, to whom most of the credit for the power of the book should go. Jones' writing serves its function but little more, and he makes a few clumsy errors: he seems to get confused between 'casualties' and 'fatalities' when talking about World War One, and he says the victims of the Titanic disaster 'drowned' when in fact most of them died from hypothermia. Most embarrassingly, he mistakes the US President James Garfield for Andrew Garfield, who played Spider-Man. He does make some decent contributions – it was quite affecting to find out that the young newspaper boy in the 'Titanic Disaster – Great Loss of Life' photograph (pg. 230) died only six years later in the Great War – but Jones' inclusion smacks of a marketing decision. For the most part, I would much rather have heard from the unknown Amaral, and the process she went through in researching and restoring the images.

Because, certainly, she has created something beautiful and intricate. Even the gruesome photos – and yes, there are some gruesome ones – show the wealth of history to an audience that has been desensitized by dates and distance. The simple concept of colourization is increasingly being used to great effect to make the past more vivid to us – see the recent Peter Jackson documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, for example, or Amaral's image (not included in this book) of a 14-year-old girl killed at Auschwitz – but rarely has it been done so successfully. Far from being a gimmick, it is a potent weapon in the arsenal of the historian seeking a greater understanding of the past. ( )