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“... services.Readers who are allergic to irony and archness may not be impressed – the book is so arch that you could drive a horse and carriage through it – but it provides a steady flow of good gags and is, in its way, satisfyingly resonant too. In its straightforward comic determination to please, The Adulterants is without many precedents in ...”

“... Svetlana Alexievich​ won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015, but some people still don’t think her books are literature. In fact, they are collective oral histories, of similar genre, though completely different in tone, to those of Studs Terkel in the United States, whom she has probably never read. Her main influence as far as genre is concerned was the Belorussian writer Ales Adamovich, who in the 1970s (with Daniil Granin) collected the testimonies of wartime Leningrad survivors in Blokadnaia kniga, but that’s not very helpful in a Western context since nobody has heard of him ...”

“... Edinburgh and London, where he camped out on the doorsteps of the literary rags – Blackwood’s, Tait’s and the London Magazine – feeding copy to the printers’ boys like a man throwing scraps of meat to the attack dogs at his heels. Harried by creditors, he lived on the run, going to ground for days in seedy boltholes. His Confessions of an English ...”