Jake Kerridge was upbeat in the Express ("McDermid's great virtue is to have made Austen's characters seem fresh in the way they would have been for her first readers"), while the Scotsman's Tom Adair hailed McDermid's "panache" in her "breezy, vital, inventive reworking" – "her obvious pleasure in the task is as contagious as Austen's wit".
Adams employs many of the science-fiction pleasures of inventive world building as well as a struggle against invasive totalitarianism.
Huyghe's art is a conundrum, and that is part of the pleasure of this inventive and thoughtful artist.
It is an inventive exhibition and often a pleasure to observe, but it confirms Siena's honourable status as Tuscany's second city.
"It's all seamlessly inventive and full of synaesthetic pleasures, but it can't fully compensate for the shallowness in other departments".
If their pleasure is to sample inventive dishes that echo the fare of regions from Kashmir to Kerala, those gods have come to the right place.
The worlds depicted are so small that a magnifying glass is necessary to examine their detail; each scene, as Adrian Searle writes, "is a small and often comic revelation", each tiny image giving "enormous pleasure"; Bewick "was as inventive as he was observant, as funny and bleak as he was exacting and faithful to the things he saw around him".
She learned to be unafraid of the human body and its myriad transformations, saying: "If you can find pleasure and fun you become inventive".
Much of the (very considerable) pleasure of this almost deliriously inventive, sharply imagined and ultimately affecting novel lies in the almost spookily vivid atmosphere and pathos that Atkinson manages to extract from all this Groundhog Day repetition.
The Guardian: "Much of the (very considerable) pleasure of this almost deliriously inventive, sharply imagined and ultimately affecting novel lies in the almost spookily vivid atmosphere and pathos that Atkinson manages to extract from all this Groundhog Day repetition".
