PositiveIrish Times (IRE)Barely a page goes past without some evidence of her need to control ... No reasonable person would deny this is an incredible story ... Written in plain chatty language much at home to parentheses and exclamation points, My Name is Barbra is exhaustive (not to say exhausting) in its treatment of struggles.
Alan Rickman
MixedThe Irish Times (IRE)... engaging, salty, sometimes repetitive ... anyone expecting the wholesale bitch-fest that made John Osborne’s autobiographies so indecently addictive is in for disappointment ... Rather than any continuing stream of bile, what we get in Madly, Deeply is a great deal of low-level griping interspersed with long lists of celebrities and exhausting accounts of world travel ... Taylor should, perhaps, have cut out more of the celebrity incantations. After a while, the lists take on the quality of an unintended running gag ... True, the book is full of complaints, but a diary is a good place to work through minor frustrations ... One senses a great and unique energy leaving the planet.
Woody Allen
PanThe Irish Times (IRE)Many readers will be grateful that Woody Allen’s memoir has arrived in a time of face masks and latex gloves. So toxic is the volume that some may be tempted to rinse it in chloroxylenol before placing on a lectern 2m distant ... so much of the book is harmless ... Was there nobody around to tell 21st-century Woody it’s no longer all right to introduce every female acquaintance with an assessment of her physical charms? ... The more general lauding of collaborators has, at least, the virtue of being unintentionally hilarious. Every actor is wonderful. Every technician is a genius ... The sense of sub-journalistic carelessness is heightened by a series of weird repetitions ... The big questions are knocked back with glib quips. His outrage at the abuse accusations drowns out all other objections ... Still, the stuff about his jazz band is nice.
Geoff Dyer
PositiveThe Irish TimesDelightful ... a very funny book. It’s occasionally a moving one ... somehow manages to stay lively while talking us through the entire plot of the film ... Some of Dyer’s targets are well-worn, but he finds fresh routes of attack ... The archness is occasionally exhausting ... remains a delightful celebration of a martial pop culture that flourished between the Suez Crisis and the rise of Mrs Thatcher. File with your bound sets of Commando comics.
