“... line to the future’. This is a reasonably faithful summary of just thirty pages of the book. It may sound frantic, but that’s not the way it felt to me. Lopez packs his pages like the hold of a cargo plane, with everything strapped down, aisles between, and labelled. The argument is sometimes fleeting, and Horizon is a less focused book than Arctic ...”

“... the only time they get to visit the seaside, even though their homes in the Occupied Territories may be no more than twenty or thirty kilometres away. There are draconian restrictions on the movement of Palestinians living in the West Bank (the residents of Gaza live in an open-air prison of their own). Yet every year, during Eid al-Fitr at the end of ...”

“... I grew weary of his shtick. He found love, moved to France, got famous. Sardonic condescension may have suited the squirrelly scrounger from North Carolina, but it was a poor fit for the European sophisticate he’d become, however self-mockingly he inhabited the role. His writing has remained competent and straightforward, but memorable prose was never ...”

“... it would amount to a kind of emotional fraud to pretend otherwise’. Polish fears that someone may turn up one day and say your home is no longer yours may be exaggerated, but they aren’t baseless. Aside from claims from the descendants of Jews dispossessed by the Nazis, a wave of ‘wild reprivatisations’ since 1989 ...”

“... in 2022.Whenever a new Tory leader takes over, journalists speculate that their predilections may reanimate and reconfigure the party. With some distance, it is less clear how much they matter. It was just about possible to imagine that May might create a Tory version of Christian Democracy, or that Johnson’s claims ...”

“... out of the party. The ensuing talent crisis led to the selection of Truss. The succession of May, Johnson and Truss to the prime ministership resembles one of those tragic but horribly memorable failed suicide attempts, in which the sufferer shoots themself in the head but fails to die. The Truss-Kwarteng mini-budget ...”

“... waits for a Canadian man she met many years ago when he was a tourist in her country, knowing he may never arrive. Another woman recalls how she fled to Europe partly to escape a marriage forced on her when she was thirteen. After working as a maid, cleaning ‘sixty lavatories … before 10 a.m.’, she becomes a sex worker, because ‘what is the ...”

“... are long gone. In fact, they are now so rarely seen that when they are visible residents may say: ‘The volcanoes came out’ – as if the mountains had ‘decided one day to take a look at us’. ‘On those rare, clear days,’ according to Villoro, ‘we’re a bit better.’ Moods are lifted and morals improved simply by the ‘possibility of a ...”

“... warning that the forest will burn. But Champerret goes further, proposing that although the grids may originally have been used for practical purposes, they evolved to form the basis of the first written poetry. This is an astonishing proposition.Just as Wittgenstein argues that one does not learn a game by reading a book of rules but by playing ...”

“... called Zoltán Pataki. Pataki still adores her. He worries that her accustomed standard of luxury may drop with a husband as practically incompetent as Mihály, so he writes to him offering a monthly cheque. But the lovely, elegant, worldly Erzsi is competent herself; she is the one who manages the traveller’s cheques, tickets and passports on the ...”

“... them, though, especially on business trips to visit dealers and view sales, where I learn what may ‘b.i.’ (that is, be bought in), what was ‘burned’ (put up for sale and not bought, thereby having its reputation tarnished), what rumour has been started by a vendor’s restorer, what the decorators will bid up, what a runner has found, and the ...”

“... connections), the old man tears up both letter and photo and flings them into a lake, so that they may ‘gradually rot in the water, just as memories do in the swamps of time’. But though the story is a record of continuous loss, there is no sentimentality, and very little self-pity. Instead, Andrés’s language shows the same grim determination – or at ...”

“... What can be done with a people that produces 246 different cheeses? General De Gaulle’s remark may be apocryphal – France has far more than 246 cheeses – but it captures a central dilemma in French history. How could such a diverse collection of peoples be forged into a single nation? The question remains pertinent ...”

“... this character, this old woman approaching death in Provence – is said not to have worked. We may have forgotten that the old lady is a fiction, a character writing a ‘dying diary’ and not Christine Brooke-Rose, whose actual plight hers so much resembles. The old lady has a bad fall, uses a zimmer frame but cannot quench the fires in her feet. Nor can ...”

“... There is still a social stigma around HIV and many will avoid the test if they can.’ But that may change: Unicef are soon to encourage community groups to tie family relief payments to recipients’ willingness to go to school and also to be tested for HIV. A fire was burning and red ants were running up the bark of the logs. Agnes and Irene were playing ...”