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“... Yet outlandishly low temperatures alone cannot account for the tremendous success of Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, even if it does open with a bleak Copenhagen December, and go on to describe a still colder place – Greenland, covered by an icecap up to a mile thick, with a climate so severe that if you need to drop your ...”

“... Great Apes looks down on them for comic relief. Each is, in its own way, amply unsuccessful. Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow made a stir a couple of years ago. Its plot was muddled, but it did have an ingratiating heroine and lots of ethnic local colour; and things happened too fast for you to think about them much. It was a good ...”

“... in a bodiless way, as though it came out of some (English-language) test-tube: people don’t read Høeg out of an engagement with Denmark, or Gaarder to see what the writers in Norway are doing these days. There is something resolutely and manufacturedly singular about the books that are translated: one-offs like stumps and yetis and chemical ...”