PositiveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Part memoir, part polemic, part garden history and part garden-making ... The impossible position of her own book evolves in a more domestic theatre. She desires a garden, a personal, private sanctuary; but this is at odds with a vigorous polemical stance that deplores private ownership of land.
Sarah Ogilvie
RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Ogilvie resolved to reanimate this dust and restore them to a place of justified importance in the history of the great dictionary. A daunting prospect, requiring years of searching; and one can only imagine that proximity to Murray’s immense task had instilled a different standard for what is difficult than usually obtains ... Affectionate and moving.
Katherine Rundell
RaveThe Telegraph (UK)... wonderful ... the biographer Donne has been waiting for. Her energy, intellect and arresting phrasemaking can keep up with her subject’s. Like him, Rundell loves the world and everything in it; like him, she notices everything; and like him, her interest is in cohesion and continuity.
Hugo Vickers
MixedThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)While Vickers is good at reproducing the atmosphere, the element of luncheon parties, memorial services and magnifying glasses on plumped lace pillows that sustains this fading coterie, he catches few such moments of oblivious self-exposure. Instead, people talk mainly inconsequentially, sometimes showing off, and often both ... Perhaps the most revelatory aspect of this adventure, and the part that Vickers has captured whole, is how little interest the subject of Cecil Beaton excites.
