... magnificent.

Hoare writes with the license of the nonexpert; you can feel the delight he takes in being unbound by anything but his enthusiasms. He is alternately precise and concealing. His biographical sections are both elliptical and redolent of entire lives. His art criticism is often stirring.

... dreamy.

An antic and original creation, it is not exactly a biography of the revolutionary Renaissance printmaker, painter and theorist of geometry and perspective.

... an ecstatic romp through several centuries of art, literature, and natural history. The name Dürer might conjure images of dark, narrow streets and half-timbered houses in old German towns, ancient Gothic script, and woodcuts so finely executed they take forever to figure out. Mr. Hoare gives us instead a thoroughly modern Dürer, a dreamer, a visionary, our contemporary.

Where the Samuel Johnson Prize-winning Leviathan was a genre-bending but still informative work of nonfiction, Albert and the Whale is yet more visionary: a tone poem put together from the lives of others, with detailed use of archives. Hoare moves nimbly between the stories of people who came before and after Dürer, but share his 'unity of perception; which encompassed aspects of 'art, science and natural philosophy'.

... a very Sebaldian new book.

Neither straight art history nor a preachy eco-Doomsday book, it contains elements of both, and a lot more besides.

This is a headbanger of a book. Albrecht Dürer is on the cover but the digressions on whales and the wild swimming the author does at the drop of his bike if there is a bit of sea, river or lake nearby are bloody annoying.

... evocatively associative.

... features striking renditions of the artist’s popular paintings and sketches, but the text is florid and often difficult to follow, jumping from analyses of Dürer’s artwork to lengthy discussions of other individuals with little apparent connection to the artist. Furthermore, Hoare doesn’t include clear attributions when quoting the artist, and the connection between the artist and a whale, as indicated by the book’s title, is exaggerated.