RaveLiterary Review (UK)Danchev was a researcher of ferocious meticulousness ... Danchev’s approach to...questions is...open-ended. He presents the facts as he doggedly finds them, leaving his audience to make the connections between Magritte’s biography and art; to each reader, his own little bowler-hatted man ... This is a fine book, and Whitfield’s tenth chapter, covering the last twenty years of its subject’s life, does Danchev’s efforts full justice. As a historian, Danchev was polymathic ... If there is a single annoyance in Magritte: A Life, it is Danchev’s tendency to wear his breadth of knowledge on his sleeve: quoting Félix Fénéon, Humpty Dumpty and Samuel Beckett on successive pages looks like showing off. But this is a quibble. For those who love Magritte and those who do not, Danchev’s biography will come as a revelation.
