RaveThe Times (UK)... an exceptionally fluent intellectual biography that synthesises the complex influences on his work while outlining the details of [Said\'s] life ...Brennan’s biography makes clear that despite his at times disparate way of writing, and a tendency to range across literature, politics, music and beyond, Said was far from being the dilettante his opponents liked to claim. His books might be faulted for not knowing about this or that German orientalist, but a lack of completeness was inevitable in such expansive work. From early on he had absorbed philosophy, literary and critical theory, structuralism, poststructuralism, and the work of thinkers such as Heidegger, Vico and Gramsci, alongside the canonical novels he read as a committed teacher at Columbia University.
Lara Feigel
RaveThe GuardianA reader in modern literature and culture at King’s College London, Feigel has something of Lessing’s diligent energy on the page, and in Free Woman she succeeds in making an extraordinary meditation on what it means to be a clever, engaged woman two generations after Lessing ... Feigel acknowledges that the freedom she desires and expects is less about freedom from servitude or want than about freedom to do as you please and exist outside categories of attachment, and hence is predicated on advantages of class, race and money. The reason this privilege does not sink the book is because she approaches her reordering of life around the precepts of Lessing and her protagonists with such focused earnestness, and with a classical, precise use of language ... Her technique is scrupulous, sparing neither herself nor others in a chronicle that is physically and intellectually intimate, in the manner of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Confessions ... Feigel has thought seriously about the meaning of freedom ... Her quest in Free Woman to do things differently is too sincere to be self-indulgent.
Maya Jasanoff
RaveThe GuardianThe Dawn Watch will win prizes, and if it doesn’t, there is something wrong with the prizes ... The Dawn Watch is an expansion of the biographical form, placing an individual in total context: Joseph Conrad in world history ... In a globalised world, Conrad’s writing has a new applicability; he writes about quandaries that we know ... Jasanoff sees Conrad’s prescience about the future direction of the world in novels like Nostromo (set in South America, which he had barely visited) as stemming from a theory of globalised capitalism that drew on direct observation. His writing was implicitly political at every turn, but he had seen too much on his travels from childhood onwards to put much faith in organised politics.
