Holroyd has a wonderful eye for detail...an entirely captivating biography...one of the glories of the form

It has all the tumbling narrative, spicy detail and easy empathy that determine his midas touch... shows Holroyd yet again pushing the biographer's art to new imaginative planes

Magnificent - not just as a fascinating exercise in group biography, but as a masterpiece of comic writing...such joie de vivre

This is a fabulous cavalcade of a book, written with infectious verve and deep imaginative sympathy ... a joy to read

Michael Holroyd has once again triumphed over a seemingly impossible subject. For so capacious is this tale of two great actors and their descendants that he has written a sweeping social history of theatre in the late 19th and early 20th-century England. Deftly plotted, with an infectious verve that springs from his delight in the waywardness of human nature

Through a rapidly evolving, scene-changing narrative, presented with a range of eye-catching effects Holroyd evokes the mysterious world of the Victorian and Edwardian theatre, the hiss of the gas footlights, the coloured lights and smoke, with all the attention to detail of the star-struck fan seated in the front stalls

He writes with eloquence and clarity, sketching the broader context with a light but firm touch and incidentally providing a literary masterclass in the marshalling and sifting of detail

'[Holroyd's] own uncanny powers of balance, perception and penetration [appear] in a multiple biography that somehow recaptures an ephemeral imaginative reality more intense to its subjects and their public than life itself

Holroyd's sweeping biography...proceeds at a furious pace, and, in less expert hands, the detail packed onto the page might bewilder; instead, the effect is of an epic, perfectly balanced by intimacies of setting and character.

As unconventional as it is fascinating

A fabulous cavalcade of a book, written with infectious verve

To attempt the biography of even one of these giants of the 19th Century English stage would be a challenge to most, but the energetic Michael Holroyd tackles both...Amazingly he carried it off in a ripping yarn spiced with melodrama and tinged with pathos

Holroyd's charmingly modest intention is to "carry readers back in time and convey a sense of adventure and intimacy with the past". In this he triumphantly succeeds

A funny, gossipy epic

Self-depracating yet never self-pitying, irreverent yet never truly cynical, she comes across as a woman genuinely at ease with herself ... French is engaging company, and at her best she writes about heartbreak and elation with such grace that her book is impossible to dislike