Richard Eder praised "Any Human Heart" in the "New York Times": "William Boyd, is multifaceted and inventive, and he plays a deep game under his agile card tricks." Christopher Tayler, in the "London Review of Books", called the characterisation of Mountstuart weak and wondered if he was merely a device through which Boyd could write pastiche about 20th-century writers, "Boyd hustles you through to the end despite all this, but it's hard not to wonder if it was really worth making the journey." In "The Atlantic Monthly", Brooke Allen liked the Mountstuart character: "he is far more generous, forgiving, and free than most of us. He is also more amusing, and more amused by life", thus making an "attractive central character" and Boyd's writing showed "a great natural vitality and an increasingly sophisticated humanism." "The Atlantic Monthly" selected it as one of the "books of the year".