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“... that he was a dab hand at warming the pot, ‘but there ain’t going to be no tea.’ Readers of Hernan Diaz’s new novel get their first sniff of a tea bag about halfway through the book’s 400-odd pages. Trust is made up of four sections, the first presented as a complete novel (Bonds by Harold Vanner), the second as a draft memoir from the ...”

“... Shortly after their dramatic entrance into the island city of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, Hernan Cortes and his companions climbed the 114 steep steps of the great central pyramid there to encounter in the temple of Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec tribal god, the stench of the blood-caked walls and floor and the sight of human hearts burning in braziers ...”

“... The people of South America are the most ignorant, the most bigoted, the most superstitious of all the Roman Catholics in Christendom,’ John Adams, the second American president, wrote in 1815. The notion that they could form a ‘confederation of free governments’, as the Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda had proposed, was as ‘absurd as similar plans would be to establish democracies among the birds, beasts and fishes ...”