PositiveLiterary ReviewWitty and protean ... Through humour, elegance and sheer knowledge, Hughes builds something remarkable ... Here and there, Hughes overplays her hand. Cats are a brilliant means through which to chart epochal shifts, but it’s going a bit too far to argue, as she does, that they were the instigators of change ... But on Victorian and Edwardian terrain, Hughes is near-omniscient.
James Runcie
RaveThe Spectator (UK)One of the book’s many achievements is its description — unsparing, blackly comic — of nursing someone through a disabling and terminal illness in a world of Zoom consultations and social distancing ... Runcie... is too good a writer to settle for fridge-magnet aphorisms about grief. Literature is his guide, Dr. Johnson and David Hume his references for widowerhood ... He is attuned to the practicality of living in, and through, sadness, grounding his prose in the grubby detritus of pain and grief, their dull bureaucracy ... His triumph is that his pragmatic collecting of such fragments for literary use never evinces Graham Greene’s notorious image of creative detachment, the \'splinter of ice in the heart of a writer.\' This book is an act of thawing, a refusal to freeze.
