About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Daisy Hay
Positive London Review of Books (UK) Hay makes the most of a vivid period in English and especially London history. Her carefully poised study puts Johnson, today an obscure figure, back at the centre of his circle ... From certain angles, despite Hay’s best endeavours, Johnson remains opaque ... A cautiously balanced account.
Anna Della Subin
Positive London Review of Books (UK) Anna Della Subin’s Accidental Gods is a philosophical and historical exploration of the phenomenon from Jesus Christ to Prince Philip and Narendra Modi, written with a poise and lucidity that allow full play to the comic aspects of her subject, while considering the frequently disastrous consequences ... Subin’s is a scholarly, footnoted work and she tells this story straight, allowing it to open up her broader themes ... Subin is too sweeping in her assertion that ‘profiteering and racism’ were ‘only ever loosely masked by lofty ideals’[.]
John Matteson
Rave The Guardian It is a tribute to the subtlety of John Matteson\'s sympathetic, compelling and at times very funny book that we are left, like many of Bronson\'s contemporaries, unsure what to make of him ... A double biography is a difficult thing to bring off but Matteson does it beautifully, giving a vivid but delicate account of two complicated characters inextricably entwined. The balance of his narrative tips naturally from father to daughter as Louisa emerges from Bronson\'s shadow, though never from his influence.
Miranda Seymour
Positive The London Review of Books Deft and compelling ... Seymour carries off a delicate balancing act, combining the historian’s proper caution with acute judgments and a dashing narrative pace ... a less detailed account of the mathematics, offers an illuminating view of the context.
Edmund Gordon
Rave The Guardian Gordon makes no trite elisions between the fiction and the life, but it is hard not to look at his illustrations in which Carter balloons and shrinks, becoming by turns vampish, boyish, girlish and bohemian, without thinking of all the metamorphoses and chimeras that recur in her work ... Gordon faces thorny ethical questions in dealing with a life in living memory. Paul Carter, who declined to talk to him, has since died, and Gordon teases out the tangled facts with gentle even?handedness, setting aside some of what Angela said as bravado, for she had been much in love when she got married ... Gordon feels free to take issue with the doctrinaire strain of feminist critique that attempts to shoehorn Carter into a politically correct shape she doesn’t fit ... Gordon knows he has caught his subject on the wing of posterity, that it will take another generation to see her “in the round” and other biographies will appear; but they will not supplant this one, which has the irreplaceable imprint of a life still warm to the touch of memory.