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“... Ilya Ehrenburg had a complaint about his friend Pablo Neruda’s work. ‘Too much root,’ he said. ‘Too many roots in your poems. Why so many?’ Neruda, reporting this remark in his memoirs, took it as a joke, which it probably was, and as a compliment, which it probably wasn’t. Isla Negra has a whole section, originally a separate volume, called ‘The Hunter after Roots’, and Neruda is not the sort of poet who hunts for things he can’t find, or indeed for things he hasn’t already found ...”

“... The story opens on a picture of a very large young lady, ‘a truly massive young person’, crossing from one house to another in Newport, Rhode Island, site of ‘florid’ villas and other structures ‘smothered in senseless architectural ornament’. On the verandah of the second house she finds her father, an inordinately rich man, sourly awaiting the death of his former partner, a slightly less rich man ...”

“... All long-term dictators are alike: all short-term dictators vanish in their own short way. This at least is the assumption of many writers and readers, and in Latin America it amounts to something like a political faith. Of course there is nothing peculiarly Latin American about dictators of any kind; but Latin Americans often believe, with feelings ranging from outrage to fascination to resignation and back, that their culture has a special ability to beget and abet these creatures, so that they look at them – or at pictures of them – with the stubborn, unavertable gaze of someone looking into a magic mirror ...”

“... It’s, on the whole, I think,’ Henry James wrote to Edmund Gosse, ‘a queer place to plant the standard of duty.’ The letter is dated 7 January 1893, 29 years before the OED’s earliest instance of queer used in relation to homosexuality, and it’s clear that James wants the word’s older meaning: ‘strange, out of the ordinary’. But it’s also clear that something else is going on ...”

“... Historians​ are often suspicious of the notion of the counterfactual. It’s hard enough to establish what happens, they suggest, without having to worry about what might have happened. The facts are the facts, aren’t they? When we have agreed on what they are, of course. But then contemporary historians inherit a large legacy of hubris, the knowledge of ‘how it really was’, in von Ranke’s famous phrase, or of ‘the way it is’, as Walter Cronkite said on US television for twenty years or so, and they have to deal with their own scepticism and ours ...”

“... Dino Buzzati​ ’s novel The Singularity was published in Italian in 1960 but set in 1972. Just a small leap into the future, but far enough for the second date to be that of Buzzati’s death. A coincidence, of course, but one that hints at meaning or design, as coincidences often do. We could say that life, for once, was mildly imitating his fiction, visiting his world of weirdly functional fantasy ...”

“... us. Mirra Ginsburg’s version, still available from Grove Press, was first published in 1967. Michael Glenny’s version was also first published in 1967, by Harvill, and reappeared in 1992 as an Everyman book. Burgin and O’Connor’s version was first published in the US in 1995, and in the UK this year; and Pevear’s and Volokhonsky’s appears this ...”

“... The continuing American blindness to Vietnam itself, in this and many other instances, notably Michael Cimino’s film The Deer Hunter (1978), can be astonishing, but the myth also shows some genuine self-understanding. Apocalypse Now, in particular, is full of the sense that Americans exported whole chunks of their culture to Vietnam and discovered its ...”

“... Slugging it out with Diana Trilling in the pages of Commentary, Robert Lowell remarked: ‘Controversy is bad for the mind and worse for the heart.’ Mrs Trilling, for all the world like Dorothea Brooke or some other 19th-century heroine of the strenuously examined life, replied: ‘I have never thought controversy bad for either the mind or the heart ...”

“... And so,’ Bréhal said, ‘love would be time become available to the senses.’ Julia Kristeva, Les Samouraïs The genuine charm and considerable strength of Julia Kristeva’s writing are inseparable from a certain solemnity and excess of diligence, a heavy shadow that dogs her like an obligation. In her novel Les Samouraïs (1990), her young alter ego is called ‘a bull-dozer ...”

“... He suffered fools grimly, because he thought there were so many of them, but he was himself far from grim. His laugh was a cross between a splutter and a chuckle, as if the joke had been cooking inside him for some time, and now was too good to be retained any longer. No mistaking the deep amusement in this laugh; not a trace of rancour or disappointment ...”

“... Nothing became her life like the remaking of it, but there were so many remakes. The latest stars Madonna, but the earliest starred Eva María Duarte herself. Or was that María Eva Ibarguren? She was María Eva Duarte de Perón on her marriage certificate, but then she also took three years off her age on that occasion. Some of this is easily unravelled, and a number of the remakes are easy to name: country kid to city girl, dancer to actress, brunette to blonde, actress to politician, President’s wife to secular saint ...”

“... Myriam Anissimov’s biography of Primo Levi, first published in French two years ago, begins with a kind of stutter surrounding the writer’s end. The book’s Introduction, prologue and opening chapter all invoke his death, as if it were a threshold that had to be crossed but couldn’t be crossed without returning. ‘On 11 April 1987 Primo Levi plunged down the stairwell of the house where he was born and had always lived’; ‘It was this man who on an April morning, after a period of dreadful depression, suddenly “exited life by the window”, in the words of the Italian critic Cesare Cases’; ‘One Saturday morning in April 1987, a tragedy disrupted the peace and quiet of the Corso Re Umberto ...”

“... Not everyone can be Whitman,’ Borges said in an interview in London long ago. He paused, pretending to reflect. ‘Not even Whitman could be Whitman.’ We knew Borges was only pretending to reflect because we recognised the joke and the timing as belonging so perfectly to him, a Borges short story in miniature, a shortest story. And also because, if we were still sceptical, we could find the joke in his writings ...”

“... Places in fiction often have a curious dual nationality. They are entangled in historical events, marked on a solid social map. ‘It’s not exactly the moon I’m asking for,’ a girl thinks in The Dark Hole Days, ‘but surely all my dreams don’t end here: me in a duffle coat signing on the dole and walking in the debris of Belfast.’ Later she adds: ‘Belfast would fit into a corner of London ...”