PositiveThe Sunday Times (UK)... [a] valuable guide ... Throughout this tortured history, Phillips writes with journalistic detail, gathering his accounts from many sources, attempting fairness. He does not minimise the difficulties that have prevented restitution ... There is also a sense that a wrong would be righted by their return. There are now plans for a new Benin City museum, designed by David Adjaye, in the hope that the building and the Bronzes it would house can reconnect Africans to the history they have lost. The measured tones of this book make that case.
Nadine Meisner
RaveThe Sunday Times (UK)...a magisterially epic study ... Meisner has pieced together...stories from other sources and they run in surprising contrast to the image we have now of Petipa as the elder statesman of dance, distinguished and immaculately dressed ... Meisner weaves this biographical material into a much broader picture of ballet under the tsars; she is excellent on the contrasting skills and styles of the ballerinas with whom Petipa worked, and who forged his style just as much as any ethereal notions of dance did. She doesn’t always see the wood for the trees, or separate the glistening solos from the work of the corps de ballet, but there is an amplitude in her creation of Petipa’s world that is worthy of so expansive a creator.
