But this doesn't detract from its originality, its charm or its peculiar beauty." Philip Hensher's verdict, in the Independent on Sunday, was that " The Yips is a very challenging novel, and perhaps in the end a disappointment – it lacks a crucial degree of refinement and polish in the execution, and sticks too narrowly to a particular tone of voice. "There is nothing conventional", wrote the Sunday Times's Edmund Gordon, about Nicola Barker's new novel The Yips, which "follows Stuart Ransom – a beery, lecherous, middle-aged golf pro … in the days surrounding an important tournament in Luton … the novel's main flaw is its occasional habit of becoming difficult to follow. For Duncan Fallowell, reviewing in the Daily Express, Catherine's "own memoirs written in French are superb and concise, unlike her latest biography here … In the end, despite Massie's exertions, I felt I understood Catherine less from him than from Marlene Dietrich's portrayal on screen in 1934."
Few biographies contain so accurate an account of the number of contractions experienced during childbirth". According to the Daily Telegraph's Frances Wilson, the book "has the pace of a good thriller, but Massie instead tells the story as a leisurely 19th-century novel in which no detail is considered too small.
While the biography is "splendidly observed", Sandbrook argued, Massie patently "adores her", so that at times "his rich, rollicking narrative feels too uncritical". R obert K Massie, author of Catherine the Great, punctures one of European history's great myths, wrote Dominic Sandbrook in the Sunday Times: the indomitable empress of Russia "did not die while having sex with a horse, but dropped dead of a stroke in her bathroom – a disappointingly prosaic end for an exceptional woman".
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