PositiveThe Guardian (UK)Thunberg is painfully aware that \'people tell me that I’m retarded, a bitch and a terrorist, and many other things.\' But her speeches—now collected and published under the title of her refrain, \'no one is too small to make a difference\'—give the lie to these caricatures. Yes, she reiterates, \'I want you to panic … I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.\' But this is offset by dispassionate emphasis on bullet-pointed facts and figures, and the defence that emotion—even panic—is completely rational ... Thunberg speaks to a people acutely aware of living in a time of transition, on a knife-edge between multiple possible futures. Her argument is not driven by a belief that we are all doomed, but is cut through with tentative hope.
Fiona Sampson
PositiveThe GuardianIn the face of...archival dearth, Sampson nevertheless builds a personality, piecing together what it must have been like to grow up and live as Mary Shelley, until we can \'see the actual texture of her existence\'. In places, Sampson is as adept as Frankenstein himself, giving life to a figure who convincingly aches and bleeds ... The landscapes and interiors within which Sampson’s subject moves are as crisply rendered as Frankenstein’s own plane of Arctic ice ... Sampson tries to rescue her from...patriarchal determinism by structuring her biography as a series of choppy freeze frames’, static painterly tableaux in Mary’s life around which she traces the run-up and fall-out ... But this methodology – this sifting of a life according to moments that posterity has deemed consequential – sits awkwardly at odds with Sampson’s self-stated biographer’s duty to \'hugely enlarge\' Mary and try to comprehend her ... In 1835, Mary reflected on how \'the true end of biography\' was to deduce \'the peculiar character of the man\' from the \'minute, yet characteristic details\' that punctuated the life: from the specifics of place and clothing and bodily experience in which Sampson’s biography excels.
