Product Description

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

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #191242 in Books
• Published on: 2003-11-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 762 pages

Review
'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

Daily Telegraph, October 2003
Nobody's Perfect is endlessly amusing and a real pleasure to dip into.

Herald, October 2003
A treat... Throughout, [Lane] reveals his integrity, culture and unremitting wit.

Customer Reviews

close enough for me...
Film crit, profiles and journalism from the New Yorker over the last ten years - what the UK has been missing since Tina Browne snaffled Anthony Lane from the Independent. Highly commended for its wit and erudition, (and for propping open doors - it's 800 pages) but be warned that it's a kind of depressing read. I've been wasting my time on all this stuff all my life, but I now realise that I actually know nothing and have not a solitary idea worth the name in my empty head. The guy's just too smart, not just on the cultstuds stuff but on Eliot, Waugh, Shakespeare - the big guys - and maddeningly witty and charming with it. Had this one next to the loo for a couple of days thinking I would spin it out over a year or so - after all how many reviews do you want to read at a stretch ? - but it was soon out and by my bedside, and soon after that seemed to be following me round the house. I finally finished it off over a couple of days solid reading. And laughing. Haven't had this experience since Pauline Kael's mighty 'For Keeps', next to which it now sits, a worthy companion.

Very funny
I bought this yesterday - I picked it off the shelf because I vaguely remember seeing it (very positively) reviewed late last year. In the shop I read his review of "The Saint" (with which I agreed) and of "Stealing Beauty" (with which I disagreed largely, I admit, out of lazy sentimentality), but both made me laugh out loud such that other customers started edging away with sidelong looks. So I bought it and spent the evening with my wife, both of us howling with laughter at "Best-Sellers I" which is like a literary tour written by Bill Bryson (in one of his earlier books) - and I mean that as a compliment to both Messrs Lane and Bryson. His re-writing of Robert Frost in the style of Clive Cussler is simply brilliant, as is his Judith Krantz haiku. For any intelligent film- or book-lover, this is a must-buy.

it's all true (to use a film title as my heading)
Dazzlingly elegant style, wickedly funny, as they say, and fit to stand on the shelf alongside Pauline Kael and Clive James. This book marks a real find for those of us who haven't been managing to read the New Yorker.

Moreover, his judgment is crystal clear, in my own view - I found myself nodding assent to what Lane had to said about The New Hollywood, Star Wars, Orson Welles, Guy Ritchie, Ang Lee, and just about everything else.

I couldn't help noticing how this British writer (because I had to check he actually was)has perfected a style that is, seemingly effortlessly, both American and British at the same time (a kind of Cary Grant prose) with all the urbanity, all the snappy rhetoric which that suggests.