Nobody's perfect - Anthony Lane

Nobody's Perfect, the much anticipated collection from the New Yorker critic, brings together a generous selection of Lane's film criticisms, profiles, book reviews, and essays on art and culture. In the manner of Edmund Wilson and Kenneth Tynan, Lane embraces high and low with equal gusto, clearly having a marvelous time. Whether he's writing about T. S. Eliot or Judith Krantz, Alfred Hitchcock or Andre Gide, to read him (or better yet, to reread him) is to be carried along on a current of passionate declamation and urgent inquiry, wry reflection and penetrating wit. Taken together, these pieces reflect some of the most brilliant writing and thinking to have graced the pages of the New Yorker, and they impart a cultural and artistic literacy of the highest order.

'Nobody's Perfect shimmers with positively Nabokovian elegance, wit and delicacy of expression; it is hard to recall when one was made to laugh out loud like this and at the same time shiver with aesthetic bliss' John Banville, Guardian

'Lane fits from art-house to blockbuster with elegance, wit and a fearsome erudition. Part of his style is to stop just short of the jugular but somehow inflict even more damage. At other times he is simply very, very funny' Sunday Times