In his writing, he puts on no airs; his literary background (English degree from Wadham, Oxford) has not held him up – or back. Sometimes his writing is so simple, you wonder at it: how did he resist the temptation to dress it up? He knows – in his work at least – when to stop.

Observer

The lovely thing about Rosen's writing is that it is rooted in the reality of his own post-war childhood – you can smell the matzo bray his father makes as a treat when his mother is out, hear the wheels squeak on his go-kart, sense the thrill of him and his 10-year-old friend Mart on holiday climbing the Sugar Loaf mountain and crossing from Wales into England with their trousers down.

Guardian

Throughout his career, Rosen has inspired children and adults to fall in love with reading.

Independent

It's a mishmash, at once merry and pensive, of personal memoir, a history of left politics in postwar England, a portal into a lost Jewish London and a portrait of the artist as a nervy young man.

Sukhdev Sandhu, Guardian