“... if the apparatus of censorship did not exist.’ This is an anthology for export only.André Brink took primary responsibility for selecting the work translated from Afrikaans; J.M. Coetzee for that in English. They do not represent their own work. Both are novelists of international reputation, and the bias of the collection is towards writers little known in ...”

“... Continental Drift, Bob Dubois dies of stab wounds on a Miami side street. That novel won the 1985 John Dos Passos Prize and was nominated for the Pulitzer. The road not taken isn’t pretty, but there’s a lot of mileage in it. ‘This is not Bambi territory,’ a lawyer says in The Sweet Hereafter, the story of a small town convulsed when a school bus ...”

“... of Amaral’s colourised photographs, this time of Lewis Powell, one of the men who conspired with John Wilkes Booth to assassinate Lincoln, and who on the same night made a savage attempt on the life of his secretary of state, William H. Seward. The shoppers were asked when they thought it had been taken. Powell is leaning against the pocked metal of his cell ...”

“... fell away in the 20th. In 1991, the Sumo wrestler Takanofuji was weighed at 21 st 6 lbs. In 1924 John Rodney Bastard weighed 2 st 9 lbs; ten years later he was 8 st 10 lbs. Trust in Berry Bros counted for a lot: that a hundredweight of coffee really was a hundredweight has always been everything; that Byron really did weigh 11 st 5 lbs; that the contents of ...”

“... In​ U&I (1991), his book about John Updike, Nicholson Baker imagines explaining the appeal of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library to his literary hero. ‘You know, once you get used to the initially kind of disgusting level of homosexual sex, which quickly becomes really interesting as a kind of ethnography, you realise that this is really one of the best first novels to come along in years and years!’ But Updike couldn’t get used to the sex ...”

“... employed throughout the text: the use of portmanteau neologisms in the tradition that James Joyce took over from Humpty Dumpty. The effectiveness of the device is more limited than is often allowed: it’s an easy trick to learn, and while the odd hit in this mode attracts praise, who keeps a tally of the numerous misses? But what would seem certain is that ...”

“... symbolically, as when the boar-killing on his birthday is read off as ‘the far come close took by the littl come big.’ And like Lisa in The White Hotel, Riddley pursues an obscure ideal of oneness, which he thinks of as ‘that thing whats in us lorn and loan and oansome’, though his problem is that ‘you try to take holt of the 1 ness and it ...”

“... Chanler clan, in the late 19th century, included II orphaned siblings maternally descended from John Jacob Astor. The eldest orphan had eight children, one of whom married Stanford White’s only child Lawrence. This Chanler lady, if you remember, became ‘Mama’ – Lessard’s grandmother with the second-generation liquid jewel/wine face. The Chanlers ...”

“... some memorable examples. My own favourite is an episode, still remembered in some circles, which took place in the Royal Court Theatre in 1958. The Tynans have taken Logue to see a play about a man who found God while being tortured by the Nazis: The Tenth Chance by Stuart Holroyd. The hero is on stage, tied to a chair, being beaten by Gestapo officers while ...”

“... the driver, enjoyed a clear view of the road ahead. Is it really a testament to ingenuity that it took so long to notice the seemingly obvious fact that legs are more powerful than arms when performing a rotational movement? Even after the invention of the pedal-driven two-wheeler in the mid-1860s, and the discovery that it was better not to pedal and steer ...”

“... scholar Ilan Stavans says he made it more American. Maybe, and not because he was trying to be John Berryman avant la lettre.) The chronology by Stephen Hart in Clayton Eshleman’s 700-page The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo (2009) is a compilation of Vallejo’s most atrocious dramas. A murderous riot, tragic love ...”

“... default on its loans; that December, US marines marched into the Banque Nationale d’Haïti, took out $500,000 worth of gold and shipped it back to City Bank’s headquarters in New York. US corporations were able to dominate entire countries thanks to the vast scale of their capital relative to the economies of their hosts: for example, the United Fruit ...”

“... a thousandfold. It is clear from Wright’s work that the struggle in Egypt, not the wider world, took precedence for the doctor; that Zawahiri may have believed the narrow, Nile-confined geography of populated Egypt made it hard for insurgents to operate; but that he put the goal of Islamic revolution there to one side, in favour of closer co-operation with ...”

“... published in 1832. Underlying his reluctance was not only fear of reliving the mocking piece by John Wilson Croker in the Quarterly Review that had so sapped his confidence, but the fact that his ‘butcher’s book’ held drafts of the shocked, numbed poems grieving for Arthur Henry Hallam, whose vigour and confidence-giving friendship at Cambridge had ...”