“... black mare Bess bestrode.’ But the origins of Turpin’s ride lie much further back, in Daniel Defoe’s Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, in which the story is told of a highwayman who had successfully established an alibi by riding in a single day, without a change of horses, from Chatham in Kent to York, where he arrived in the ...”

“... includes ‘the veiled millionaire disguised as a woman’ (Lord says ‘third-class passenger Daniel Buckley’ admitted seeking safety this way and there may have been others) and a Gothic phantasmagoria of ‘hermaphrodites ... showing their orifices’ in the Turkish bath and dowagers getting themselves whipped under the card table by depraved cabin ...”

“... possible. In Foe and The Master of Petersburg, written around imaginary episodes in the lives of Defoe and Dostoevsky, this interrogation is further refined into an examination of the nature of authorship and of the writer’s authority over his subject. Coetzee’s own style is sometimes parodic, sometimes allegorical. He has made free use of destabilising ...”