MixedThe Wall Street JournalPart misery memoir, part revenge tragedy, this is a curious document ... Feels like a therapy session in which the patient will talk about anyone other than himself ... The contradictions are many. He is obsessed with the cruelty and opportunism of the press, yet his writing spares no one ... Memories and opinions are mixed throughout ... Provides acute insight into the privileged misery of a 1960s childhood of divorce, a subject Mr. Spencer also braved in A Very Private School (2024). But his new attempt at closure reminds us how real events can be written from very different perspectives that, other than on the baldest of facts, would agree on very little. I am not sure what he is trying to say; I am not sure he even knows. It’s hard to argue with the king’s estimation that the Spencers lack a sense of duty. For an intelligent man and fluent historian, this spite work on the royals—for that is it what it is—is written with all the subtlety of a rabid corgi.
Callum Robinson
RaveThe Wall Street JournalAstute, piquant ... Hughes-Hallett...has the historian’s sense of context and the novelist’s sense of character. She luminously spins the story of Buckingham’s attempt to orchestrate a triumph of international and marital relations.
Zahra Hankir
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalArtfully blend a history of the eye cosmetic with an emotive treatment of makeup’s relation to the self ... A thoughtful, unlikely romp across the world, viewing a small but significant part of cultural history, through a keen (and boldly defined) eye. Ms. Hankir is at her best when examining people at close range, interviewing a subject or writing about herself. Her book is very early-millennial in tone; it will be most congenial to those who embrace online popular culture.
Lucy Ward
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalAll the descriptions of lancet cuts and pus are one thing—it is the experimentation on impoverished children that makes for painful reading ... a detailed account of a specific encounter, with fully fleshed reporting on a specific moment when two lives come into contact through the fear and treatment of a dreadful disease. More than anything, it is a biography of the birth of vaccination. As such, it is a deft and captivating chronicle of an opportune subject. How much is familiar to us now: the balance of risk in parental love; the limited power of statistics over the masses ... Ms. Ward, a former politics reporter, writes in journalistic prose that occasionally lapses into management- or even street-speak—\'top-down,\' \'and the rest.\' And I railed at the idea of Catherine being considered quite so brave when she had random children to test on and had the education to grasp the statistical probabilities of inoculation versus disease. Still, this is an undoubtedly energetic and timely account of a man and woman united in their mission to advance science to save lives, including their own.
