Brilliantly drawn ..the pages are full of Wildean paradoxes

Literature for the Twitter generation

Hugely accessible . . . writes about difficult things without letting on that they are difficult

A romp through art history and the creative mind ... full of entertaining anecdote

Gompertz doesn't have it in him to be boring. He clearly loves art too much and his book ... succeeds as a short love letter to art. The pictures are wonderful

Told in painstaking but often beautiful detail... It's more like a dual biography, with [his father] Ai Quing's story taking up the first 150 pages, a useful corrective for westerners who know little about him

Engrossing... A remarkable story

One of the world's most significant creative talents

The most important artist working today

A majestic and exquisitely serious masterpiece about his China, which is in fact a book about our world. His is one of the great voices of our time

1000 years of joys and sorrows are here concentrated into a mere 100. They are years that teem with life of a startling variety. The presentation is artful and the translation exquisite

An eloquent and unsilenceable voice of freedom

Ai Weiwei is the kind of visionary any nation should be proud to count among its creative class. He has drawn the world's attention to the vibrancy of contemporary Chinese culture

Elegiac... vivid and revealing

[An] ambitious memoir... 1,000 Years of Joys and Sorrows touches on the inevitable contradictions of being an activist and an art superstar, but it is above all a story of inherited resilience, strength of character and self-determination

Ai Weiwei's detention in 2011... forms by far the most compelling part of the book... These exchanges are crisply and humanely recreated, as are those with Ai's well-educated interrogators

A close look at a father-son dynamic, written in affecting terms, as well as a narrative about legacy, politics and creativity

Few people have combined art and activism to greater international acclaim than Ai Weiwei, with installations that address free speech, the environment and the global migrant crises.... Ai's new memoir, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, can be seen as another act of defiance. As a child in Mao Zedong's China, he writes, he was subject to a culture "that made our memories vanish like shadows." The book, published November 2, is his effort to reclaim his country's and his family's dramatic past

An illuminating through-line emerges in the many parallels Ai traces between his life and his father's... Ai writes evocatively of the nights spent in his detention cell when "all I could do was use memories to fill the time, looking back at people and events, like gazing at a kite on a long string flying farther and farther, until it cannot be seen at all." Most poignant are his midnight conversations with the young, rural-born men employed to guard his door, their cracking joints reminding Ai of "a crisp snapping sound like a turnip being broken into two pieces... In "1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows," Ai does not allow his own scraps to remain buried. To unearth them is an act of unburdening, an open letter to progeny, a suturing of past and present. It is the refusal to be a pawn - and the most potent assertion of a self

Moving and passionate... Weiwei writes with clarity and detail, and readers can feel the anxiety of political turmoil and the power of disobedience as he defies Chinese authorities, over and over again ... heart-rending yet exhilarating

A heartfelt history of his own experiences, and those of his father, the celebrated poet Ai Qing... Through his reflections, Ai presents a gripping history of twentieth-century China and a timely reflection on the importance of art as a medium for underscoring injustice, and never forgetting

[A] tale of extraordinary resilience...Ai Weiwei vividly reflects on his own life and that of his father

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.