PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)... level-headed ... Hemingway-heads will find much to pore over here, but no one comes out of it well ... Christian does an admirable job of painting a vivid picture of Welsh in the early years of her life ... despite Christian’s valiant attempt, she cannot be pulled out of Ernest Hemingway’s long shadow.
Laura Thompson
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)\"... exquisite and gossipy ... the women are too varied, their lives too disparate to draw a conclusion. But what japes we have along the way ...
Thompson, a gifted storyteller, obviously delighted in the writing of this book ... She is also deft: historical facts and dates and laws are woven into a kaleidoscope-bright tableaux of human highs and lows. You learn almost by accident as you gorge, pruriently, on the glamour and the glitz.\
Nick Groom
MixedThe Times Literary Supplement\"Points are all good, but do they need to be made quite as insistently and repetitively as they are here? The Vampire is academic to a fault ... One gets the sense that no piece of research has been allowed to go unmentioned: the bibliography runs to some twenty-five pages, the notes to forty. Groom sounds like an enthusiastic teacher – he is indeed a Professor of English in the University of Exeter – pursuing his pet topic through a series of interminable lectures, in which only the occasional gruesome nugget shakes awake the dozing student ... there is very little psychology here at all ... There is much to relish here...But these pleasing factoids are not enough in themselves to breathe life into this turgid corpse of a book. Groom wears his scholarship like a ball and chain. It takes some doing to make vampires dull. Yet, alas, this is exactly the feat he has managed.
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