MixedThe Times Literary Supplement\"...if her book had been, as it ought, a living portrait of Lear rather than a doomed attempt to narrate his life, she would have produced the best kind of literary biography, even if the best in this kind are but shadows ... Well before the end of Uglow’s narrative, I no longer cared about which country Lear was travelling in, who he was with, what he ate, what comic misadventures befell him, or how many drawings he made. Far from reinforcing the significance of travel to Lear’s life, the repetitive account of trains and steamers, roads and rivers, mountains sketched, perils avoided, friendships strained, leaches meaning out of the narrative. Uglow’s usually crisp prose wilts, and she resorts to a tourist guide’s patter ... Uglow has something interesting to say on almost every facet of Lear’s life and work, taken individually. When she gets off the chronological treadmill her gift as a storyteller is evident, and her assessments of character and motive are almost always sensible and convincing. As a critic she is lucid, clever, conversable; she doesn’t talk down, and her readings are excellent, the heart of the book.\
