“... of himself as one of those gifted souls who carry a star ‘on their shining brow’. A Franco-Irish interchange like this may seem surprising, but that is largely because the current proclivity for embedding authors’ works in sealed and solipsistic national literary traditions makes it that much harder to see just how transnational the whole ...”

“... tale belongs to a darker, more Faulknerian strain of fiction. When she was a teenager, her father, James Druck, was implicated in a notorious scam that involved killing horses in order to claim on the insurance; he ended his daughter’s promising equestrian career by paying someone to electrocute her prize pony. After that, she seems to have had, as they ...”

“... gothic in mood, but has a plainness and tact. Sometimes, in these pages, one wishes for what Henry James (apropos of Poe) called ‘the indispensable history of somebody’s normal relation to something’.The best​ of the stories stand out because they slip the noose and allow contingency into their version of things. Henri Thomas’s ‘The ...”

“... comparison. Her later documentaries, Sud (1999, filmed in Jasper, Texas, following the lynching of James Byrd Jr and inspired by her reading of James Baldwin) and De l’autre côté (2002, filmed in Agua Prieta and Douglas, on either side of the US-Mexico border), use the same formal strategies as D’Est. If, in ...”

“... General Alberto Bayo, a Spanish career officer who had fought against the Moroccans and against Franco during the Thirties. Exiled to Mexico at the end of the Spanish Civil War, he had begun a new life, training youthful Caribbean revolutionaries. When Fidel (whose own father came to Cuba during an earlier Spanish emigration) was casting around for a ...”