Rating: 
Summary: OK, if you enjoy an author enjoying his own cleverness
Review: For readers who fancy condescending and self-aggrandizing wit, this book could be a treat. It reeks of intellectual pride and sardonic misanthropy. It isn't only the characters who are unpleasant; to judge from the content and narrative tone, you wouldn't want to spend much time with the author, either.
Rating:
Summary: A waste of time, money and paper!
Review: After reading the glowing New York Times review, I rushed to buy this book in hardcover. That purchase is certainly the worst I have made in some time, and I would advise others who have an interest in this topic or in works by the author to avoid this novel. In fact, I hate to even give the book away and subject someone else to the tediousness of this work.
Rating: 
Summary: ENTERTAINING ROMP THROUGH THE WORLD OF ART
Review: The author, Michael Frayn, was asked in an interview if this novel would be considered a "farce". He answered in the negative. Frayn felt the story depended as much on circumstances as it did on the character's plans and reactions to the situations arising to meet them. I compare this book strongly with Peter Mayle's "Chasing Cezanne". Mayle's book can be considered a farce. The pages turn quickly as new locations show up. Frayn's book looks deeper into the art world of the fourteenth century. Pages turn a little slower, but with just as much intensity. I recommend both titles.
Rating: 
Summary: Highly captivating and witty historical art sleuthing
Review: It's all in the book: humour at its English best, serious scholarship, art lessons, historical plots, mythology, everyday virtues and vices of married life, greed, religion, and one of the greatest artists ever as main charachter. Read it!
Rating:
Summary: I probably would have given 'Headlong' the Booker myself.
Review: Visited London for the first time this past August and among the highlights of the trip were reading 'Headlong' and seeing Frayn's 'Copenhagen'. Terrific blend of farce, moral ambiguity and scholarship, this is one of the best books I've read all year. Tremendously entertaining, it also includes some of the most lucid art history I've ever read. Frayn makes Bruegel's paintings come alive and his descriptions of Holland under Spanish rule are chilling. Very intelligent. Very funny.
Rating:
Summary: Delightful, and so funny!
Review: This clever, broad comedy had me stifling belly laughs every day on the train, as I commuted into the city and read. I loved "Noises Off", and this book has a bit of the same complicated, overwrought planning and fumbling, misinterpreted intentions, cleverness gone totally stupid, the destruction of pride that comes from tryong too hard to protect one's pride.
Rating: 
Summary: How could Kurt Vonnegut enjoy this?
Review: The book started off well enough but went nowhere. It dragged on and on and the ending was too clean. All loose ends neatly tied up.
Rating:
Summary: An art history page-turner
Review: Engaging story of an academic who discovers what may, or may not, be a forgetten masterpiece in a moldering English country home; his efforts to convince himself and his skeptical wife of the painting's provenance; and his increasingly complex scheme to swindle the painting from its owner, establish his place in art history, and pick up a couple of million pounds sterling in the process. Very enjoyable, fairly quick read.
Rating:
Summary: Awkwardly written about specialized subject.
Review: Headlong gets one star as in A for effort. The style is awkward and jolts. The subject matter -- mostly history of the Netherlands -- is near text book style -- and the characters are undeveloped. The lead characters stay married because one is Catholic. They smile at each other musing about the failings of their poorer half. Then they plan to have another child. Psychologically abhorrent.
Rating:
Summary: Hilarious, smart and just a bit wicked
Review: Comsidering the error in the Kirkus review (the protagonist's wife is Kate, not Julia) and the pan below by the "art historian" (with this book, Michael Frayn, among so many other things, pulls the rug out from under all interpreters of art and history), I wonder if there's anybody reading this wonderful book with a clear, interested eye. There's so much going here-an intellectual mystery, sophisticated humor, the disintegration of a consciousness and escalating slapstick-that one wonders just how many balls author Frayn can juggle. My guess, based on the wisdom, the courage, the talent on display, is as many as he wants too. Sure, the characters aren't heros, but who really fascinating is? This novel thrills, challenges, instructs and best of all, elbows you in the gut. It's as if A.S. Byatt's POSSESSION was written by Evelyn Waugh.
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