Which books are making the critics lose their cool? We’ve rounded up the best bad reviews:
Mary Beard (Guardian) on Rome by Robert Hughes
“The first half of the book, especially the three chapters dealing with the early history of Rome, from Romulus to the end of pagan antiquity, is little short of a disgrace — to both author and publisher. It is riddled with errors and misunderstandings that will mislead the innocent and infuriate the specialist.”
Matthew Syed (The Times) on Ghost Milk by Iain Sinclair
“Psychogeography, it would seem, at least in the hands of Sinclair, is not merely obscure, but impenetrable. I read the opening chapter, then the second chapter, hoping that the short, skittish, machine-gun sentence structure, the random jumps in time and context that are Sinclair’s leitmotiv, would become intelligible; in the manner of a hologram which, when looked at for long enough, eventually locks into focus.
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