MixedFinancial Times (UK)Compelling and informative ... But the test of an artist’s biography is always going to be how it treats the paintings, and here Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found is much less successful ... With a life meagrely documented even by 17th-century standards, largely because his art was admired only in small and private circles, the biographer has no choice but to speculate, infer, and suggest. But the purpose of such speculation should surely be to expand and multiply the possible meanings of the artist’s works. Time and again, Graham-Dixon does the opposite, and presents his interpretation as having solved the mystery of a Vermeer painting once and for all ... This book is well-grounded in scholarship and, apart from these passages of purple prose claiming to enter the minds and bodies of Vermeer’s figures, the writing is lively and adroit, but it lacks the most elusive and characteristic feature of Vermeer the artist: tact.
Orlando Reade
RaveThe Guardian (UK)The readability and economy of Reade’s book is all the more impressive given the sheer amount of information on which his account relies ... The finest and most difficult balance that Reade successfully strikes is between lauding Milton as a rich resource for those in search of inspiration and of freedom, and recognising the abhorrent characteristics of his imagination that have made him amenable to his more repulsive interpreters.
Jamel Brinkley
RaveThe Guardian (UK)An extraordinary gathering of stories that confirms Brinkley’s place among the most moving, compelling and virtuosic practitioners of the short form ... What seems above all to define the particular brilliance of Brinkley’s artistry with the short form... is his ceaseless conjuring of the small groupings that crystallise the predicaments and joys, the folds and the creases, of contemporary life, and Black American life in particular.
Benjamin Balint
RaveThe Observer (UK)Balint does a fine job of capturing Schulz’s life and his world before the war, his deeply peculiar mind and the fascinating figures in whose orbit he moved ... At times he veers into unhelpful psychologising ... Ultimately, however, Balint has more than just Schulz’s life and works in view, and his book begins and ends with the events from which Schulz’s contemporary reputation has become inseparable.
