RaveThe Financial Times (UK)Basil moves from childhood domesticity — Mumji, her own cute greediness, her mother’s precious kadhi — to wider public issues, interrogating each in the context of hospitality: democracy, climate change, immigration, religion, food waste and Brexit, to name a few ... If we could learn to love beyond the narrow compounds of our own communities, we would become more hospitable creatures. Borders would crumble, resources would be shared and nobody would starve — these are the logical results of universal unconditional hospitality. In other words, if the whole world digested Be My .Guest, we’d be OK ... It won’t happen, of course, and Basil doesn’t pretend that it will. Chauvinists, xenophobes, climate change deniers— inhospitable people the world over — will detest her compellingly beautiful book. From certain angles, her quest looks like hard work. At times, I wondered if Basil ever gets tired of such moral vigilance and longs to sneak off for a small bacon sandwich. But I doubt it overall. Her choices don’t feel like chores. There is — I gather from her book — deep happiness to be unearthed along the way.
Dominic Dromgoole
RaveThe Financial Times[Dromgoole] relates each [vignette] with colour and candour. Yet his book also charts a deeper, personal quest for insight and meaning. Whether he is in Mexico with a dose of diarrhoea or Ukraine with President Petro Poroshenko, we find Dromgoole churning over the great imponderables — war, love, liberty — in the context of Hamlet ... Somehow, Dromgoole is almost never irritating. There is something pleasantly unguarded and uncouth about the way he writes. His tone is modest and frank. He is able to give the final word on human existence without sounding pretentious ... Dromgoole and his company belong in the ancient tradition of strolling players — quick-witted and wise, generous, hard-drinking and open. His book is written in that spirit. It is bold and excited, hopeful, dashing and just a little bit ragged. By the time we reach the final show back on London’s Southbank, it is a wrench to part his company.
