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“... an odour for which there is no name in the language, and which should be called the ‘odeur de pension’. The damp atmosphere sends a chill through you as you breathe it; it has a stuffy, musty and rancid quality; it permeates your clothing … Yet, in spite of these stale horrors, the sitting-room is as charming and as delicately perfumed as a ...”

“... Like his elder contemporary Henry James, Eça deQueirós belongs to the small and distinguished group of 19th-century novelists who wrote in exile. He was born in 1845 in a remote town of northern Portugal, but spent most of his working life in England and France. He liked to maintain that his novels were fundamentally French, and that he himself was French in everything but his fondness for ballad-singers and cod with onions ...”

“... descriptions’ – as Michael Wood put it in his review in the LRB of 3 January – that make up Eça deQueirós’s ‘masterly’ The Maias would have cost Dedalus £23,000 to translate. If it paid for it itself, of course: grants are available to English-language publishers from foreign cultural organisations, and ...”

“... itself’ has kicked up a gear. The fact that huge swathes of the US were already living in a de facto post-Roe world – and honing the skills involved in clinic defence, ‘lawyering for reproductive justice’ and pill-smuggling for ‘self-managed’ abortions – is the only available comfort to the rest of us, who are now catching up with what it ...”