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“... at the time was ten million). The novel, published in Portuguese in 2002 and now translated by Margaret JullCosta and Annie McDermott, captures that period of change, the ‘feeling of danger when the wind’s whistling in the cranes’. The action takes place in Valmares, a fictional village on the Algarve ...”

“... A Heart So White and Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me. All three are admirably translated by Margaret JullCosta, who not only catches the meanings of words with grace and precision, but gets rhythms of thought, and even better, rhythms of afterthought to carry over into English. Marías writes the kind of ...”

“... version of The Book of Disquiet was translated into English four times in one year: in 1991, by Margaret JullCosta, Alfred MacAdam, Ian Watson and Richard Zenith. The last of these texts started out as The Book of Disquietude, but the longer word was soon dropped. As ...”

“... crafted descriptions in Eça de Queirós’s masterly novel The Maias, extremely well rendered in Margaret JullCosta’s new translation. The novel is set in Lisbon in the 1870s: 1875 to 1878, to be precise, with a couple of flashbacks to establish the family history, and an epilogue placed in 1887, the year before ...”

“... When I said I was moving from northern Spain to Seville, the same warning came from every northerner I knew: those Andalusians always act so friendly, but watch out, you can’t trust them. I found this puzzling, for the only thing I’d want to trust them to be was friendly, however superficially; I didn’t expect them to save my life, or even to keep my non-existent secrets ...”

“... whimsical recasting of the biblical materials. The first sentence of the book, an illustration of Margaret JullCosta’s deft translation, strikes this note: When the lord, also known as god, realised that adam and eve, although perfect in every outward aspect, could not utter a word or make even the most primitive ...”

“... Julio Llamazares’s novel The Yellow Rain, much praised and much bought when it was published in Spain 15 years ago, tells the story of Ainielle, a small, remote Pyrenean village in the final stages of its disappearance. One by one, the last families load what they can onto mule or mare and set off down the mountains in the hope of finding a less hardscrabble life somewhere else, abandoning their houses to woodworm and rust, and their remaining neighbours to an increasingly starved and shrunken existence ...”

“... And he may be thinking,’ we read in Berta Isla, Javier Marías’s last novel but one, published in Spanish in 2017, ‘that, basically, he belongs to the category of people who don’t see themselves as protagonists, not even of their own story … who discover halfway through that … their story will not merit being told by anyone, or only as a fleeting reference when recounting another person’s more eventful and interesting life ...”

“... him the film in which his double will first appear. The (old-fashioned) name Tertuliano is, in Margaret JullCosta’s translation, ‘most unusual’. In Portuguese it’s ‘nada comum’, which means the same thing, but has the advantage of chiming with everything in the book that is ‘common’ (and shared) or ...”

“... smells of rottenness.In 1991 Serpent’s Tail published a translation of The Book of Disquiet by Margaret JullCosta based on what she called ‘a thematic selection’ by Maria José de Lancastre that had appeared in 1982 in Portuguese. Her version is half the length of Zenith’s, which was published by Penguin ...”

“... In one of literary history’s great instances of the pot calling the kettle black, Henry James complained of ‘the absence of spontaneity, the excess of reflection’ in George Eliot’s work. To other readers, of course, the proportion that Eliot – or even late James – sets up between narrative spontaneity (or action and event), on the one hand, and reflection or disquisition, on the other, seems harmonious and attractive, and it’s certainly easy enough to think of novels suffering from the opposite problem of lots of action and little thought ...”