The Button Box

Knight explores her own family’s history and, in parallel, the intimate history of women in the 20th century… The politics of being a modern woman are revealed through changing fashions… In Knight’s hands, buttons – the humblest of everyday objects – become portals into the past, charting our progress along that road.

Lucy Moore, Literary Review

Charming book… Knight’s brilliant notion is to use the button box she inherited from her grandmother as a way of delving into the fabric, literal and metaphorical, of the women who wore them… A patchwork of memory, anecdote and deft quotation.

Daisy Goodwin, The Sunday Times

Inspired by her own shimmering box of toggles, clasps and buckles, Knight takes us on an ingenious tour of domestic and social history over the last century… From this core of very personal material, Knight writes more generally of ordinary women’s lives and changing prospects over three generations, of clothes as self-expression, as defiance, as entertainment, as evidence of frugality and frivolity all rolled into one.

Claire Harman, Guardian

The drama of women’s lives from the 19th to the mid-20th century was hidden in plain sight among the brightly coloured buttons that rattled so enticingly in [Knight’s] grandmother’s Quality Street tin… Fascinating social history.

Jane Shilling, Daily Mail

An unusual and irresistibly delightful account of more than a century’s worth of women’s lives… This is a book to make you smile, a story luminous with nostalgia… Delicious gem of a book.

Juliet Nicolson, Spectator

[Knight] quotes like a dream, cherry-picking bon mots from sources far, wide and delightful... There are plenty of curious and quirky details.

Shahidha Bari, Financial Times

A sweeping look at how women’s clothing has developed as our place in society has evolved… A delight.

Shirley Whiteside, Independent

Broader social history is approached through the rich, vivid stories… These buttons…tell an intimate story of changing times.

Louise Carpenter, Sunday Telegraph

Each trinket of the past comes to life, giving a nice nostalgic and informative look into the history of fashion, the Great War and even a few comical anecdotes on sex and relationships.

Phil Robinson, Northern Echo