English has written a terrific book, taut and thematic where it could so easily have been slack and baggy. Finding a focus cannot have been easy ... And Hitler is so huge a figure that a less assured writer would have had trouble cutting him down to size and keeping him in play. But English manages all this deftly; the result is a book as beautiful as it is bleak.
The Gallery of Miracles & Madness is a superbly told story of worlds colliding ... There’s so much that’s wonderful about this book; it’s hard to know where to start heaping praise. It is by turns intriguing, tragic, horrifying and occasionally funny. I was sad when I finished it, a feeling I usually only get from novels ... [English] writes in a carefully controlled and phlegmatic fashion, allowing outrage to emerge from the events themselves, rather than from the manner of their telling ... Hitler is Hitler; there’s not much new that can be said, yet English somehow does .
This is not an abstract book of ideas ... The Gallery of Miracles and Madness is profoundly heartbreaking, unexpectedly redeeming and immensely important.
