RaveThe Guardian (UK)Those who choose to judge this biography as the product of a writer gone soft on totalitarianism or espionage fail to grasp its true heart. Sebba makes clear her own distaste for communism, and her explicit mission is human rather than political: it is to \'extrapolate\' Ethel the woman from the whole notorious, sordid story. In doing so, she brings us a woman, rather like Plath’s heroine, suffocated by the \'madness that incarcerated so many women in different ways in the early 1950s\' ... Sebba has dug deep beneath this famous and archetypically male story of spying, weapons and international tensions to give us an intelligent, sensitive and absorbing account of the short, tragic life of a woman made remarkable by circumstance.
Nesrine Malik
PositiveThe Financial Times (UK)\"Malik, a journalist, is skilled at digging beneath the surface of political rhetoric and popular culture to find prejudice, stereotypes and distorted historical narratives. In each chapter she identifies a tool used to prop up key myths...The effect is like the prose equivalent of a mechanic peering under the bonnet of a car and triumphantly holding aloft pieces of faulty machinery for her audience to gawp at ... For all the deployment of such devices, Malik’s style is dense and declaratory. She moves from historical exposition to straight reporting (her telling of the murder of Jo Cox is one of the most chilling accounts of the British MP’s last minutes that I have read) to columnist-style polemic ... It is worth persevering because Malik has important things to say ... doesn’t make for an easy or comfortable read, but her arguments echoed powerfully in my mind long after I had put the book down.
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Vivian Gornick
PositiveThe New Statesman (UK)New York, with its eccentric characters and charming or explosive random exchanges, figures large in Gornick’s work and the city again forms the explicit backdrop to her latest book, The Odd Woman and the City, an artfully arranged series of portraits of urban life, friendship and our heroine ... If it feels like a more settled, surer-footed work than Fierce Attachments this is probably because Gornick, three decades on, is more reconciled to her \'odd woman\' status...
