RaveThe Wall Street Journal... meticulous and invaluable ... Ms. Fitzsimons draws abundantly on Moore’s and Briggs’s research, but her palette has an even greater range of colors, and she also brings to light many previously hidden biographical watermarks. If her book lacks Briggs’s stylistic elegance, she excels in providing exceptionally illuminating and detailed portraits of the extraordinary group of practical and utopian socialists, mutual-aid anarchists, theosophists, feminists, radical freethinkers, and trailblazing writers who were part of the Bland-Nesbit milieu ... [a] fine biography.
Jenny Uglow
RaveThe Wall Street JournalMore than any of the five previous Lear biographies...Ms. Uglow’s nearly 600-page book miraculously takes wing, soars higher and provides a more inclusive bird’s-eye view of almost every aspect of Lear’s life ... At various moments throughout this avian journey, Ms. Uglow swoops down to examine and explicate with hawk-like acuity the ludic complexities of Lear’s writings. She brilliantly elucidates the interplay between the drawings and words in Lear’s limericks ... Mr. Lear is lavishly produced and resplendently illustrated with color and black-and-white reproductions of paintings, drawings, sketches and photographs—many of which have been rarely seen. For me there is just one word to describe Jenny Uglow’s book, a word that Lear used to describe a sumptuous dinner party ... splendidophoropherostiphongious.
