PanThe Evening Standard (UK)The account of Meghan’s formative years sounds like something from the Lives of the Saints hagiographies. Did she ever do anything unkind, ill-judged or plain wrong? Not here. It feels primarily like a book about how great Meghan is, with interstices on Harry’s trials in being the younger brother to the heir to the throne ... Less is never more in Finding Freedom’s prose style ... For all the abundant absurdities and self-parody chronicled in lavish purple here, the Megs and Harry saga feels like a lost chance and an unfinished story.
Susan Neiman
MixedThe Observer (UK)Growing up in the American south during the civil rights era, and spending much of her adult life in and around Berlin as a Jewish woman, Neiman has a keen ear for discomforts and awkwardnesses and the small tics of guilt and avoidance ... I think [Neiman] underplays the extent to which the task of \'working through\' history becomes ritualistic ... Where the account goes awfully wrong is in the musings on East Germany, where Neiman is prone to accepting the GDR’s self-serving use of its \'anti-fascist\' badging at a face value it never merited, despite the good faith of many cultural figures in the idea ... It would be a bit like talking about Brexit Britain through the eyes of a lot of Remainers and Lib Dems. The narrative of \'colonisation\' of the east by the west after unification is treated unsceptically.
Niall Ferguson
PositiveThe Evening StandardFerguson shines most when we are treated to his own intuitive leaps. He has little trouble jumping from, say, the Illuminati, a secret society in 18th century Germany peddling Enlightenment ideas, who sound a bit like the worthy sorts running the BBC Trust, only to end up as fodder for everevolving conspiracy theories about groups who 'really' run the world ... Occasionally, it feels like we have entered arcane byways — niceties of Inca social organisation and the like — where the broader implications are vague. His sharpest insights are often about the role of networks in fomenting and sustaining political power.
