John Carey in the Sunday Times thought John Lahr's Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh was "worth reading just for the anecdotes and the famous names of stage and screen that flit through its pages. But, in essence, it is a study – compelling, incisive and often painful – of how art feeds on life." The author "gathers material from a vast array of sources, including Williams's diaries, poems and letters, and the recollections of countless friends and colleagues, to trace how the personal and creative lives interweave throughout the whole span of Williams's oeuvre. The result is at once sensitive and magisterial, and it fulfils the ultimate test for a literary biography by convincing you that the works cannot be understood without it." John Sutherland in the FT less fulsomely praised a "very long but never dull book"; he was impressed with Lahr's battles with a literary estate "that would have defeated a less pugnacious writer". A no-nonsense Roger Lewis in the Times considered it a "marvellous, huge, almost out-of‑control biography, which would be immeasurably improved if cut by two-thirds".
Graeme Simsion's romantic comedy The Rosie Project, about an autistic man's search for love, was a huge bestseller last year. Now he has published a sequel, The Rosie Effect, in the opening pages of which Don, the protagonist, finds out that his new wife is pregnant. According to Helen Rumblelow in the Times, "Simsion is very smart at negotiating the line between a satire of the whole modern baby-rearing neurosis and drawing intriguing characters. But in order to do so, in order, crucially, that Don remains as sympathetic as he does, he has to bend his own rules. Don becomes too incredible for my satisfaction, unfeeling one minute, preternaturally empathetic and self-aware the next. Still … it becomes a parable for all male-female couples expecting a baby." For Nick Curtis in the Evening Standard, Don is "the protagonist who keeps on giving. He is a gem, an empirical laser trained on human shortcomings, especially male ones, and even more especially his own. He is also utterly charming in his lack of guile and his belief in improvability". The novel is "blissfully comic".
"Indefatigable, judicious, with a magpie's eye for detail and a lovely grasp of tone and balance, David Kynaston is one of the great chroniclers of our modern story," judged Dominic Sanbrook in the Sunday Times, reviewing Modernity Britain: a Shake of the Dice, 1959–62. "Occasionally the detail, piled dizzyingly high, can be overwhelming, yet since every paragraph contains some glittering nugget, it would be absurd to complain. This is history not as grand narrative, but as total immersion." David Aaronovitch in the Times argued that Kynaston's "breadth of research leads him to find passages that can make you gasp"; he is "the master of leavening the heavy with the light. He uses a montage of diary entries, newspaper comments and recollections to create sly little juxtapositions which illuminate without openly instructing." The Daily Telegraph's Alwyn Turner joined a chorus of acclaim: "Kynaston has an enviable ability to see both the trees and the wood, and patterns start to appear; from the mass of facts and trivia emerges a picture of a slightly confused country struggling to negotiate the last days of Empire … Kynaston's project is already being acclaimed as one of the great achievements of modern history, and this fourth instalment, with its entrancing mix of entertainment, erudition and enlightenment, will enhance its status further."