MixedProspect Magazine (UK)A whopping great study ... This is impressive detective work ... For all the historical heavy-handedness, Graham-Dixon still contrives to give us the deepest and most rounded portrait of Vermeer we are ever likely to have ... What’s oddest about Graham-Dixon’s readings is that he feels the need to make them ... Looking for meaning in these pictures is like looking for significance in the fact of your being alive ... I am being hard on this book because parts of it are so impressive ... In the end though, Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found is no truer to its subject than Tracy Chevalier’s high-end period-piece potboiler Girl with a Pearl Earring. Case dismissed.
Edwin Frank
RaveThe Telegraph (UK)A masterclass in masterpieces ... Even the least interested of Jonathan Bate’s students should enjoy it.
Brian Cox
RaveDaily Mail (UK)Putting The Rabbit In The Hat is one of the best showbiz memoirs ever written, but its quality comes at the expense of the feelgood froth that usually fills such books. Cox is as honest here as he is on stage and screen ... The book has a kind of brutal integrity ... Everyone loves a rags-to-riches story, and Cox is highly informative about the craft of his art. But the account of his climb up the theatrical ladder...is the dullest bit of the book ... More entertainingly, Cox constantly carps at other stars ... The book isn’t all agitprop. It’s as funny as it is furious ... Cox quotes advice from the director Lindsay Anderson: ‘Don’t just do something, stand there.’ Brian Cox has done everything, and with this book he leaves everyone else standing.
Tony Judt
RaveThe ExpressWhether Judt was grateful for being left compos mentis cannot but be a moot point but given the breadth of knowledge and quality of thought bodied forth in The Memory Chalet his readers can have no such doubts ... We should all be thankful his brain kept working even as the disease did everything it could to deprive him of a world to work upon ... Anyone who wants to begin learning about what is going on in the Middle East or why Marxism failed could do a lot worse than start here ... Yet there is a lot more to The Memory Chalet than the political history that made Judt’s name.
