Critical Reception
Digital Spy praised the song stating it is "a big, proper, important-sounding ballad – the piano chords tremor with passion, the strings sweep impressively and every strum of the guitar seems to quiver with emotion – it offers copious proof that Gary Barlow's flair for melody is still very much intact."
The band's performance of the song during the London 2012 closing ceremonies was lauded as inspirational, in light of the loss of Barlow's stillborn daughter a week before.
Read more about this topic: Rule The World
Famous quotes containing the words critical and/or reception:
“The male has been persuaded to assume a certain onerous and disagreeable rôle with the promise of rewards—material and psychological. Women may in the first place even have put it into his head. BE A MAN! may have been, metaphorically, what Eve uttered at the critical moment in the Garden of Eden.”
—Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)