SOURCE: "Yorkshire Terrors," in The New York Times Book Review, March 31, 1996, pp. 13-14.

[In the following review, Macintyre praises Atkinson's portrayal of Yorkshire life in Behind the Scenes at the Museum.]

Yorkshire has an established and self-nurtured reputation as a place of heroic complaint. Nothing is ever quite so bad as it is in Yorkshire. The weather is worse, life is harder, the coal mines are deeper and darker and the scenery harsher, you will be told, than in other, softer lands.

Until, of course, someone unlucky enough to be born outside Yorkshire should dare to chime in to this litany of grievance, at which point the Yorkshire native will point out that the beer and cricket are better, the emotions richer, the history deeper, the women kinder and the men braver than anywhere else on earth. The sheer bloody awfulness of life is a badge of honor...