“A dazzlingly written and wildly eccentric mashup of biography, history and memoir. One of the most original and uncategorisable works I’ve read for a long time. Indeed, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to describe it as a life-changing book as Hoare clears away our assumptions about Blake and makes us look at this brilliant, baffling genius in a completely new way. Get ready to see it on some important prize shortlists this year.”

– The Times (London)

“Hoare’s impassioned style, alive with metaphor and wordplay, has often been called ‘dreamlike’. This is apt, given his total immersion in his subject. There is a sense here that Blake may step into the room at any moment. But the fluid approach is underpinned by other strengths: an impressive breadth of reading; acute critical insights; crisp descriptions of techniques, and of political and cultural movements. Beneath the leaps and returns, the book is skillfully structured, following Blake’s life and art. One can foresee a rush of books in the run-up to 2027, the bicentenary of Blake’s death, but nothing will be as audacious or intriguing as William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love.”

– The Times Literary Supplement

"Philip Hoare brings the fizz of his own sensibility to bear on the work of a man whose progeny of artistic spin-offs multiply with each passing generation. The result is a book that is neither Blake biography nor critical analysis nor legacy-tracing nor personal odyssey but a capacious mixing of them all. He takes us on a joyful and dizzying romp through the stories of those who came under Blake’s posthumous spell. Each of Hoare’s subjects is affected with a certain wildness, a loosening of societal norms that makes for expressive beauty and eccentricity, giving the author a host of colourful and hyper-connected anecdotes. In doing so, they make him a part of the very tradition he is recording, his own work here reaching ecstatic heights, his prose filled with moments of sudden clarity, his life and passions glimpsed."

– The Spectator

"A mesmerising tapestry, intricate, strange . . . 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, author of The Garden Against Time

"Queer in all senses of the word"

– Neil Tennant, Pet Shop Boys

"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

“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

“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

"In his typically allusive and impish style, Hoare has unfurled a whole tapestry of lives connected to Dürer’s work and its themes. He extrapolates an entire cosmology, a way of seeing the world every bit as rich and penetrating as Dürer’s."

– The Washington Post

"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 Irmsher, The Wall Street Journal

“I loved this new book by Philip Hoare. It’s a rare adventure in reading, drawing us into a swirl of narratives that mingle and resonate. The author is always there, as art critic, historian of culture, naturalist, biographer, and memoirist. His supple voice grounds the stories, with images and refractions of Albrecht Dürer rarely far from view. The rhythms of the prose are deft, seductive. What a fine achievement!”

– Jay Parini, author of Borges and Me

"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

“A poetic fever dream of a book. Blake, in Hoare’s telling, is not merely a poet or a painter but a kind of spectral force. Hoare [has a] unique and idiosyncratic voice: part scholar, part mystic, part Quentin Crisp-ish raconteur.”

– The Telegraph

"More slippery than a straight biography, the book instead swoops cormorant-like into Dürer’s life and times. Albert and the Whale glitters with arresting details."

– The Economist

"Marvelous, unaccountable. Its strange charisma, the book’s fluidity, the unpredictability of which disrupts everything, transmuting whatever is steeped in it into something rich and strange."

– Literary Review

“Hoare’s impassioned style, alive with metaphor and wordplay, has often been called ‘dreamlike’. This is apt, given his total immersion in his subject. There is a sense here that Blake may step into the room at any moment. But the fluid approach is underpinned by other strengths: an impressive breadth of reading; acute critical insights; crisp descriptions of techniques, and of political and cultural movements. Beneath the leaps and returns, the book is skillfully structured, following Blake’s life and art. One can foresee a rush of books in the run-up to 2027, the bicentenary of Blake’s death, but nothing will be as audacious or intriguing as William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love.”

– The Times Literary Supplement

“A dazzlingly written and wildly eccentric mashup of biography, history and memoir. One of the most original and uncategorisable works I’ve read for a long time. Indeed, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to describe it as a life-changing book as Hoare clears away our assumptions about Blake and makes us look at this brilliant, baffling genius in a completely new way. Get ready to see it on some important prize shortlists this year.”

– The Times (London)

"Philip Hoare brings the fizz of his own sensibility to bear on the work of a man whose progeny of artistic spin-offs multiply with each passing generation. The result is a book that is neither Blake biography nor critical analysis nor legacy-tracing nor personal odyssey but a capacious mixing of them all. He takes us on a joyful and dizzying romp through the stories of those who came under Blake’s posthumous spell. Each of Hoare’s subjects is affected with a certain wildness, a loosening of societal norms that makes for expressive beauty and eccentricity, giving the author a host of colourful and hyper-connected anecdotes. In doing so, they make him a part of the very tradition he is recording, his own work here reaching ecstatic heights, his prose filled with moments of sudden clarity, his life and passions glimpsed."

– The Spectator

“A poetic fever dream of a book. Blake, in Hoare’s telling, is not merely a poet or a painter but a kind of spectral force. Hoare [has a] unique and idiosyncratic voice: part scholar, part mystic, part Quentin Crisp-ish raconteur.”

– The Telegraph