"This wild, dreaming leviathan of a book is undoubtedly Hoare’s masterpiece. Who but the leading visionary of English letters could take on Blake, and find in him such riches? It is a mesmerising tapestry, intricate, strange and very queer, that ranges through time and space to create both a loving, wonderstruck portrait of the artist and a map of the universe of enchantment, terror and revolt that he opened for us all."

– Olivia Laing, acclaimed author of The Garden Against Time

“Hoare captures the singular genius of poet, artist, and visionary William Blake in an exuberant romp through Blake’s life, times, and afterlife. An ardent admirer of Blake’s 'fantastical ideas,' Hoare praises him as 'the Willy Wonka of art, your golden ticket to other worlds.' Endearingly intimate. An imaginative response to an enigmatic artist.”

– Kirkus Reviews

"Wild, free, exhilaratingly beautiful, and so alive to the past that everyone and everything seems to be happening right now on the page. I cannot think of a more original writer at work today. Only Hoare could find the Johnny Cash in William Blake, or loop the line so gracefully to Oscar Wilde and Gerard Manley Hopkins. This is his greatest masterpiece yet."

– Laura Cumming, art critic, The Observer

"An impassioned magnum opus celebrating Blake's star-shaken genius by discovering his lineage everywhere in the author’s own crystal cabinet of artists and outlaws. A tremendous literary performance."

– Iain Sinclair, author of The Last London

Praise for Albert and the Whale:

"Queer in all senses of the word."

– Neil Tennant, Pet Shop Boys

"This idiosyncratic account of the life, work, and afterlife of the Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer considers how art imagines our world. Hoare shows Dürer’s responsiveness to his times, and places his subject in a surprising lineage of artists including William Blake, Marianne Moore, Thomas Mann, and Andy Warhol. These comparisons elucidate Dürer’s radicalism, and establish him as a revolutionary and thoroughly modern artist. Hoare writes, 'Before Dürer, dragons existed; after him, they did not.'"

– The New Yorker

“You can feel the delight Hoare 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. Somehow, Hoare’s frequent cuts between the present, the recent(ish) past and more distant history end up feeling like no cuts at all; instead of whiplash or disorientation, what results is an almost calm feeling of all these times existing simultaneously, in the moment of reading. Albert and the Whale will pull you in like the tide.”

– John Williams, The New York Times

"I doubt that any other writer has grasped so deeply the feral, sensual undercurrent of Dürer’s art or has felt so acutely the artist’s attunement to the fierce animals that live in his works: the bony, narrow-headed dogs; the hirsute walrus, seemingly as ancient as the world itself; the armored rhino, as big as a house, menacing in its hardened, ornamented glory. Albert and the Whale is full of such unexpected insights into Dürer’s art, expressed with epigrammatic force and clarity. It is perhaps Dürer’s greatest achievement (and now also Mr. Hoare’s) to have shown us that this fantastical world is not so strange after all, that, in its fearsome splendor, it must be ours too."

– Christoph Irmscher, The Wall Street Journal