“... with Communist and Socialist votes, set about repressing the left and the trade unions. His friend Pablo Neruda fled the country. Allende stayed, denouncing the crackdown but working to get national healthcare enacted in 1952, 13 years after first proposing the idea. Allende won his first Congress seat with a total of 2021 votes, barely 3 per cent of his ...”

“... Spain, the eternal Spain that all of us carry in our hearts’. When a ship chartered by Pablo Neruda brought thousands of Spanish Republican exiles to Valparaíso in 1939, Allende, still Chile’s minister of health, was there to welcome them. Four decades later, Augusto Pinochet, having dispatched Allende, told Henry Kissinger that his country ...”

“... class who wanted some say in how the country’s natural resources were exploited, and by whom. Pablo Neruda may have been a dank Stalinist in his politics, and have allowed this to infect his poetry, but he was writing as a patriot when he composed the potent verses entitled ‘They Receive Instructions against Chile’ (translated here by Robert ...”

“... his authors had deserted him, only one returned to him shadowily and he uttered his name: ‘Pablo Neruda.’ That’s very interesting,’ the Englishman had said, adding wryly, ‘But wasn’t he a diplomat? It seems we do some good things sometimes.’ There was a gentle murmur of laughter round the table, in which Jayojit, just 24 years old, had ...”

“... have gone soft. Mañungo’s return to Santiago coincides with the death and funeral of Matilde Neruda, widow of the great poet who was Chile’s only other modern cultural superstar. For an outsider it is impossible to say how far Curfew’s vivid portrayal of Pablo Neruda’s surviving friends and the members of ...”

“... had a truly poetic gift, though in a minor key. In fact, he is, together with Cesar Vallejo and Pablo Neruda, the most widely translated Latin American poet of the century and has been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize. The musical connection is an apt one, for Guillen was a writer of pop poetry avant la lettre, the composer of soft song ...”

“... Communists of that generation appreciated the finer things in life. Later I discovered that Pablo Neruda liked to receive homage in the shape of crates of whisky and tins of caviar.The officials at Havana airport prodded the Stilton with knitting needles lest it should turn out to be a bomb. ‘Operation Mongoose’, the United ...”

“... stiffened with charts and figures, of British decline. As I read it, a line from one of Pablo Neruda’s poems came back to me. After depicting the damage and humiliation inflicted on Chile by irresponsible rulers and unaccountable corporations, Neruda closed by saying simply: ‘and the trunk of the tree of ...”