Acker is a postmodern Colette with echoes of Cleland's Fanny Hill

A coming-of-age story which examines incest and paedophilia with a profoundly Sadist literary bent ... can be credited with moving mainstream literature into indie territory.

Acker's work, more than that of any other writer I can think of, challenged the traditional lines of demarcation between poetry and novel, between high culture and popular trash and, perhaps most important of all, between literature and art world.

[Kathy Acker is] part rebel bohemian avant-gardiste, part NYC downtown punk, and part venerable literary grande dame

Twenty years after her death and I still miss her

Acker gives her work the power to mirror the reader's soul

Acker understands that writing without myth is nothing

Kathy Acker's writing is virtuoso, maddening, crazy, so sexy, so painful, and beaten out of a wild heart that nothing can tame. Acker is a landmark writer

Scarified sensibility,subversive intellect, and predatory wit make her a writer like no other

An avatar of nomadic urban modern primitive tribes... her novels perform postmodern campfire grill voodoo... She was a magician

Reading Kathy Acker is like playing hopscotch with a genius

A single porcelain pot is sufficiently beautiful to behold, as is this dramatic, gloriously theatrical and irresistibly passionate pilgrimage into a dark hall of mirrors

a lyrical yet admirably unflinching tale

a fascinating voyage

A quirky memoir that engagingly weaves together a history of porcelain with his personal history

A mighty achievement

A compelling and thoroughly absorbing amalgam of history, autobiography, travelogue and philosophical ruminations on the nature of creativity and many other things besides

De Waal…sees the world in a shard of white porcelain, thoughtfully and poetically tracing its invention and material production from imperial China through medieval Europe, and Cherokee creeks to the satanic factories of Nazi Germany. Global cultural history, structural and individual: this should be a humanising core text on the now sadly abandoned liberal arts curriculum.

An intimate and lyrical writer with a sophisticated grasp of cultural history… De Waal’s prose thrives on exchanges of curiousity… The White Road feels like a long book, and a long book may sometimes have qualities peculiar to its size. It may be by turns capricious, slow-drifting, and affected. It may yet enlarge your world.

A stylishly written account with a surprisingly spiritual dimension. Engrossing.

De Waal’s charm lies in his ability to undertake obsessive research, to pile up and accrue, to involve the reader in almost frantic travelling, note-taking and reading. There’s no doubting that The White Road is a mighty achievement.

His enthusiasm is infectious... This is not just about one ancient industry – somehow, superbly, it's about industry itself

A powerful memoir-cum-manifesto

Entirely keeping Ai Weiwei's taste for provocation...his memoir refuses to play by the rules... [1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows] leaves the reader with little doubt of Ai's commitment to freedom of expression and his willingness to confront power and inequality in all its forms

[A] brave commentary on totalitarianism and his confrontation of the Chinese authorities

An eye-raising, compelling read.

[It] gave me a new confidence in how to engage with, understand and, more importantly, enjoy wandering around an exhibition.

For those…insecure when viewing art, not always sure how to decode it or emotionally engage with it, this offers a lifeline…Utterly compelling.

A typically elegant ad absorbing book by one of t great contemporary English Writers, and with strong Gallic undertones – a wonderful set of essays about artists, many of them French, covering the period from Romanticism through to modernism.

Opinionated, enthusiastic, witty and beautifully written.

Julian Barnes is best known for his fiction...but he's also an excellent art writer... Peppered with personal insights and select historical detail, each piece is as engaging as the next

Unusually moving.