MixedThe Spectator (UK)Some of the parallels work, and some strain ... At times this feels like a tennis match, with one’s head as the ball, from reading two disparate narratives that are not always adequately linked ... Bate knows Keats’s life and poetry inside out, and his readings of ‘Isabella, or the
Paula McLain
MixedNewsdayGellhorn was a woman of wit and fire, but you wouldn\'t know this from McLain’s fictional version. Here, Gellhorn is depicted either as a panting girl, blushing and desperate, or a discouraged lover, upset at being a mistress and terrified of losing a man she doesn’t really possess ... Gellhorn’s own writing is barely a blip in Love and Ruin. McLain\'s scenes of Marty and Hem at war, and in the second home Gellhorn makes for him in Cuba, are often richly and [sic] well written. But for Martha Gellhorn to be made immature, dispassionate and even tiresome is fiction indeed. The glimmer of her admiration for Eleanor Roosevelt, based upon the friendship that Gellhorn had with the Roosevelts, and the brief scenes between Martha and Eleanor make one yearn to read about that part of her life instead.
