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“... A ten-minute Jesuit nap with shoes on releases the hypnagogic sentences mimicking the rhythms of sports commentary, morphing darkly into a story like this: In the sunless world where we’d arranged to meet everything’s lit from within and space has nerves that pass through your throat (if you slide along them like a curtain ring it will hurt the next day) but it turned out to be much harder to leave my body behind than my slugabed mind, so we plumped for the Donkey on Fire instead with its comforting smell of public carpet, billiard balls clacking and vinyl silences ...”

“... This line came to me out of the dark: suspiciously luminous gherkin. And then it was the promised iceberg, an intern with his neurohammer, midnight calm, a lake of tea, the south with its barbaric clusters of stars … None of it made much sense but I thought: If it’s all there is in the pantry, I can make the dark meal out of this. My flame card is the key to the town ...”

“... Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago de Chile in 1953, moved with his family to Mexico City at the age of 15, and was inspired by the election of Salvador Allende to return to his native country five years later. In his short story ‘Dance Card’, which accords with the known facts of his life and does not present itself as fiction, Bolaño indicates that he hardly distinguished as a young man – if he ever did – between his politics and his love of poetry: ‘I reached Chile in August 1973 ...”

“... Roberto Bolaño likes to prolong his jokes well past the moment when even the slowest reader has got the point. Nazi Literature in the Americas, for example, looks like a single gag – the brief deadpan biography of an imaginary Fascist or near Fascist writer – multiplied by 30-odd cases over 200 pages. But then it dawns on even the slowest reader that what looked like the point wasn’t the point; and that the jokes were not only jokes ...”

“... after the county reorganisation of 1975. This cycle of novels follows the career of a Scotswoman, Chris Guthrie, from childhood on a croft in the North-Eastern coastlands, through the disruption of the First World War and two marriages, to middle age in a soulless city, ‘Dundon’, which combines repugnant features of Aberdeen and Dundee. The first ...”

“... cultural models. By the time we come to the mid-19th century and after, the period covered by Chris Baldick’s The Social Mission of English Criticism, university English Studies and London Oxbridge English cultural imperialism go blithely hand in hand. This is a fruitful context in which to consider George Davie’s new book. Its pages contain in ...”

“... idea of publishing it as a stand-alone novella. It is enthralling. ‘From what I understand,’ Chris Fogle says, at the beginning of his video interview, ‘I’m supposed to explain how I arrived at this career. Where I came from, so to speak, and what the Service means to me.’ He is trapped in the present, he disclaims. The work has had that effect on ...”

“... Within hours of her murder Tony Blair spoke of it as ‘a disgusting act of barbarity’. David Andrews, the Irish Foreign Minister, said that it was ‘clearly designed to sabotage the peace process at this very critical time’. A crowd of about two hundred young people marched on the RUC station at Lurgan. A few of them threw petrol bombs at it. Mrs ...”