RaveThe Guardian (UK)It has taken a humorist, Craig Brown...a man who supposedly trades in throwaway wisecracks, to tell us something thought-provoking, perhaps even deep, about monarchy ... Many enjoyable vignettes ... Perhaps she is speaking to us between the lines of what others say about her. This might just be her story, as told to Craig Brown.
Ed. by David Dawson
RaveThe Sunday Times (UK)[Freud\'s] letters from the time are like first drafts of outrageous, blackly comic tales ... Much of Love Lucian is made up of commentary, insightful as it is. Does this handsome volume end up telling us anything more than William Feaver’s tremendous two-volume biography, just out in paperback? It’s an emphatic yes from me. One of the pleasures of the letters is Freud’s accompanying illustrations and cartoons ... Part of the charm of this book is the revelation — to me, at least — of [Freud\'s] sense of humour.
John Richardson
RaveThe Financial Times (UK)There’s a gamy, taurine flavour to Richardson’s volume IV ... Richardson pores over it line by line, toggling from the canvases to the life and back again, drawing on his own experience of Picasso and long immersion in his oeuvre. We follow Picasso’s hot and cold affairs, his protean experimentation, the intrusion of world events into his field of vision. In a persuasive interpretation of the masterpiece Guernica, Richardson describes not only Picasso’s rage and grief over the civil war in his Spanish homeland but the never-forgotten loss of his sister Conchita, who died in childhood ... With this gripping, highly readable and thoughtfully illustrated volume, Richardson finally takes his leave of the artist in 1943. The last three decades of Picasso’s life proved to be beyond him. An editor’s note records the labours of bringing this volume to publication, crediting Ross Finocchio and Delphine Huisinga as Richardson’s collaborators, but offers no clue about his possible successor. It’s hard to imagine that he could be bettered as our guide in the labyrinth of the minotaur.
