Ronson has a fantastic dry wit and tiptoe-through-the-tulips style that reminded me of Roald Dahl ... The attitude of gentle, dogged bemusement in The Castle seems preferable to many of the more strident positions struck by his…subjects.
Contains a series of riveting portraits of very different men who, he believes, are unravelling because of the same condition: acute purposelessness caused by a rapidly changing society ... Mark is the figure holding the book’s various narratives together, and he is in some ways the most striking of the lot owing to the dazzle of his money. I found him, though, the least compelling of the men Ronson investigates ... It will be up to the reader to decide whether the various narratives in The Castle coalesce convincingly to support the notion that we live in a 'a world of unravelling men'. For me, they don’t, simply because each case is so idiosyncratic. But it doesn’t matter: this is an unmissable piece of work.
