Calasso has written a brilliant, eccentric, provocative, annoying, and thoroughly splendid celebration of a great painter.

As one has come to expect of this polyglot and polymathic author, the range of references that inform his viewings is broad, deep and effortless

The next best thing to visiting Europe and seeing the painter's work . . . Calasso is one of the most demanding and intoxicating critics writing today.

She vividly charts the birth of surrealism . . . a tale rich in absurdity and outlandish characters, from Cocteau and Max Ernst to Dali and Picasso

Sue Roe describes with plenty of colour how surrealism was born and developed in Montparnasse . . . Roe marshals [the figures behind dada and surrealism] with great finesse

Enjoyable, engaging, rollicking - the storytelling is lively

Admirable. What an eye for art Roe has. Brilliant

An elegant synthesis of complex material... it excels: Roe is a skilled and graceful writer.

Lively and engaging... in her entertaining, ingeniously structured account Roe brings Montmartre's heyday back to life.

[Roe]skilfully weaves her descriptions of artworks into her romp through the artists' struggles and fractious relationships.

A colourful narrative describing the travails and triumphs of an equally colourful cast.

With evocative imagery Roe sketches out the intensely visual spectacle on which Montmartre's artistic community was able to draw

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.