Lucy Inglis has done a wonderful job bringing together a wide range of sources to tell the history of the most exciting and dangerous plants in the world. Telling the story of opium tells us much about our faults and foibles as humans – our willingness to experiment; our ability to become addicts; our pursuit of money. This book tells us more than about opium; it tells us about ourselves. -- Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads

Lucy Inglis’s fabulous book Milk of Paradise is the history of civilisation as shaped by opium . . . a triumph, epic in scale and full of humanity. Geopolitics was changed by the poppy: it influenced the development of navigation, exploration and world trade; hand-in-hand with war, it helped to create the wealthy economies, science, medicine, crime and human despair of the modern world. The poppy, she says, will always be one of the greatest global commodities for good and evil - and we will always be at war with it -- Melanie Reid - The Times

As Lucy Inglis recounts in her sweeping new history of opium, the tension between the substance’s medicinal virtue and its dangers is ancient ... [She] untangles these contradictions with gusto ... a deeply researched and captivating book - Economist

Shows again and again how counter-productive prohibition is - Evening Standard

Poppy tears, opium, heroin, fentanyl: poppy latex is a bringer of sleep, of pleasurable lethargy, of relief from pain – and hugely addictive. A commodity without rival, it is renewable, easy to extract, transport and refine, and subject to an insatiable global demand.

In Milk of Paradise, acclaimed cultural historian Lucy Inglis takes readers on an epic journey from ancient Mesopotamia to modern America and Afghanistan, from poppy juice to heroin, from morphine to today’s synthetic opiates. It is a tale of addiction, trade, crime, sex, war, literature, medicine and, above all, money. And, as this ambitious, wide-ranging and compelling account vividly shows, the history of opium is our history and it speaks to us of who we are.

‘Fabulous . . . Milk of Paradise is a triumph, epic in scale and full of humanity.’ The Times

‘Inglis has graced her pages with tales and medical snippets to provide enough information to feed a small library. This must be opium’s definitive history.’ Julie Peakman, History Today

‘If only all historians could write like Lucy Inglis.’ Paul Lay, The Best History Books of 2018, fivebooks.com

'A deeply researched and captivating book.' The Economist