PositiveThe SpectatorEliot, naturally, occupies centre-stage in young master Toby’s 90th anniversary celebration, and not merely for his husbandry of a poetry list that included Spender, Auden, Larkin and Hughes ... Alive to the fact that most publishing commemoratives are dull to the point of stupefaction, Toby Faber has taken the oral history route, constructing a narrative out of correspondence and diary entries, with his own interpolations primed to supply context. Attractive though this is, the book is an odd undertaking. The last 40 years rip by in a scant 40 pages, and great as the fanfare that subsequently attended authors such as Kazuo Ishiguro and Paul Auster, there is a limit to the enjoyment that can be got out of letters from editorial sponsors of their early work that routinely begin with bromides about enjoying the first five chapters and hoping to make more detailed comments on their return from the Frankfurt Book Fair. Still, what follows is, for an official history, agreeably even-handed...
Lee Jackson
PositiveThe Wall Street Journal...[a] beguiling study of the 19th-century entertainment industry ... Mr. Jackson may have other oppositions in view...but in the end nearly everything he has to say takes us back to the famous line in Twelfth Night about virtue never being able to see off the attractions of cakes and ale ... If Mr. Jackson has a thesis to prove, the great strength of his book lies in its attention to detail. For on one level, Palaces of Pleasure is merely a gigantic tableau of bygone life...
