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“... Spanish tends to the vernacular, though some of its colloquial vitality has been leached out by Anne McLean’s slightly ponderous translation. Her preference for Latinate polysyllables sometimes loads the text with a sententious ballast absent in the original, but that hardly spoils the fun. Cercas’s prose is content to be prose, and it survives ...”

“... Enrique Vila-Matas’s new novel centres on Bloomsday, the annual celebration in Dublin of the day on which Joyce’s Ulysses is set. Many nations celebrate mythical events, but Ireland commemorates a fictional one. It is as if Britain were to dedicate a feast day to Falstaff or to the Artful Dodger. For some in Ireland, Bloomsday is a useful alternative to memorialising the Easter Rising or the United Irish Insurrection: honouring uprisings against the British has been controversial ever since the shadow of the IRA hung over the country ...”

“... the Scottish Parliament, it seems that devolution has soothed the nationalist itch. Yet, as Iain McLean and Alistair McMillan recognise in their study of the unionist political tradition, this still leaves unresolved the issue of what now underpins the British connection. For unionism, they argue, is now dead outside Northern Ireland. ...”

“... I met Anne Sexton six months before her suicide, in April 1974. My colleague Carol Smith and I were doing a series of interviews with women writers, and we had heard how Sexton and her friend Maxine Kumin had worked together for years, talking about their poems in long telephone sessions when neither of then could get out of the house ...”

“... Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, an accomplished account of the two years she spent at the McLean mental hospital in Massachusetts in the late Sixties. It’s a missive sent from inside a sickness; not just a description of what it is like to suffer from an eating disorder, but an expression of that disorder – a symptom, even. The book is strangely ...”

“... into my stomach like a sword-swallower’s sword and made me feel powerful and god-like’?After Anne Stevenson’s, Janet Malcolm’s and Jacqueline Rose’s battles to get the archives opened, and the passing of the copyright to Frieda Hughes, Sylvia’s daughter, we now have the unabridged journals, the restored text of Ariel and these two new volumes of ...”