PositiveLiterary Review (UK)All of this is covered marvellously well in Bedford’s own work, which leaves her biographer the task of sorting through the endless love affairs ... It must have made Hastings’s task onerous and I fear the reader will grow weary of the lists ... As a companion to Bedford’s own writing, this biography could hardly be bettered. It is comprehensive and sympathetic, but not entirely uncritical. Could a thematic rather than a chronological chapter scheme have given it more zing? At least then the discerning reader could have skipped most of the lovers and gone straight to the heart of the matter, Bedford’s own glorious books.
Atul Gawande
RaveThe SpectatorWe need people of such outstanding intelligence and compassion to consider the ever-growing problems associated with our ageing population ... The book proposes some attractive solutions, notably various kinds of assisted living. How viable such schemes are to anyone but the well-off is another question ... The elephant in the room is dementia ... They and the people who look after them are stuck in a ghastly limbo and even a mind as fine as Atul Gawande’s cannot find a way out. He is, after all, a doctor: he likes problems that can be solved. In Being Mortal he accepts that he does not have all the answers, but calls for more imagination and invention in the care of the old and the dying. This is a truly important book.
Jeanette Winterson
RaveThe SpectatorJeanette Winterson has proved herself a writer of startling invention, originality and style. Her combination of the magical and the earthy, the rapturous and the matter-of-fact, is unique. It is a strange and felicitous gift, as if the best of Gabriel Garcia Marquez was combined with the best of Alan Bennett ... It is a testament to the subtlety and control of Jeanette Winterson’s prose that this monstrous woman, who, by her coldness and her madness and her misery, caused her only child such dreadful suffering, emerges from these pages as a figure of dark comedy, even of pathos ... the memoir is brave and beautiful, a testament to the forces of intelligence, heart and imagination. It is a marvellous book and a generous one.
