MixedLondon Review of Books (UK)... this slight volume may risk disappointing ... It only deals with Wells’s life up to 1911, with no suggestion that there is another volume to come; its brisk narrative pace struggles at times to accommodate descriptive summaries of several of his books; and it is not obvious that it draws on significant new sources, beyond a few letters to Amber Reeves taken from the as yet unpublished fifth volume of his correspondence. Still, it’s a very agreeable read for the most part and conveys Tomalin’s enthusiasm for much of Wells’s fiction without asking too many probing questions. Her concluding tribute is that Wells ‘wanted to reorganise the world so that everyone could enjoy it, and, if he did not succeed in that as well as he had hoped, he gave his superabundant energy to speaking and writing for the cause.’ That may seem a little too easily said: could anyone succeed in a task described in those terms—indeed, what could such ‘success’ possibly look like? The risk is that the judgment damns with flabby praise. Nonetheless, Tomalin is a weighty advocate, and her admiration may help to spark a revival in Wells’s reputation, though perhaps even her noted empathy and artistry still cannot quite re-create for us, now, what all the fuss was about.
Hermione Lee
RaveThe Guardian (UK)Stoppard emerges from this deeply sympathetic, even forgiving, biography as a shy man who has found a way to show off; a man who can’t quite believe his luck but can’t quite believe anything else, either ... It is tempting to see \'Hermione Lee\' as one of his greatest creations—a professor who knows more about a playwright who writes about professors than he knows about himself, a narrator who understands about unreliable narrators and isn’t fazed by them, a reader who always gets the joke. And she appreciates the theatre and its lore without being a luvvie ... It seems unfair that a man of such outrageous gifts should also have been allowed to magic up the perfect biographer to write his life ... Lee’s biography is perceptive, knowledgeable, stylish and very long. The only times I found my mind wandering to the prospect of interval drinks were during the slightly breathless (and hugely detailed) descriptions of Stoppard’s social life once he became a celebrity ... Readers who, by contrast, like their biographies to romp along from lunch party to lunch party may find that Lee’s long analyses of the plays clog the action, but for my money her astute and unfailingly clear accounts of Stoppard’s complex creations are among the great strengths of this exceptional biography. Her attentive exposition of the themes and intricate plot of Arcadia is almost worth the price of admission by itself; Stoppard has often been criticised for being \'heartless\' or too purely \'cerebral\', but it is one of Lee’s several literary-critical triumphs to identify the emotions that drive so much of his work[.]
