“... along with all the ‘writers of the no’, writers who turned their backs on writing, Rimbaud and Walser among them – is not in the same game as me. Or if we are in the same game, I’m not playing it right. I don’t turn my back on writing. I don’t say no. I say yes and fail to follow through. I sit suspended between preferring not to and not preferring ...”

“... periodically reverts to a hirsute beast in Virginie Despentes’s torrid first-person rewrite of Robert Louis Stevenson (its title winningly translated as ‘Hairs on Me’). The creatures are present because short stories make it their business to speculate about an otherness they do not have time to investigate, and animals are far-reaching analogies. They ...”

“... have done, a life undivided by such a cataract. In his introduction to A crowd is not company, Robert Kee voices some similar thoughts about the experience of war in youth. In fact, the subject of his book is not so much ‘death, fear, hunger’, as the effects of a unique kind of confinement on a young middle-class Englishman of his generation ...”