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“... Sunday Times book, Philby, the spy who betrayed a generation, which he co-authored in 1968. Mr John Costello has produced Mask of Treachery, dealing with Blunt, while Mr Robert Cecil has written a biography of his former Foreign Office colleague Donald Maclean. To round things out, we have The Storm Birds, Gordon Brook-Shepherd’s study of the Soviet ...”

“... this media activity was more than the new philosophy of freedom of information, as described by Costello in his afterword: ‘The Russian Intelligence Service has therefore set a new level of openness and has advanced the boundaries of intelligence and counter-intelligence history writing.’ The KGB was also going to solve the pension problems of its older ...”

“... rather, and the tones, are those of the old artificer, the father of the tribe, Simon Dedalus, John Stanislaus Joyce. Like the violins of Cremona, Dubliners, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake are the products of a joint concern, a family undertaking. Joyce himself was frank about this. As long as he had escaped he could still be in the bosom of the family. As long ...”

“... much she shares with her creator is one of the device’s loitering teases. Her name is Elizabeth Costello, an Australian novelist born in 1928, famous like Coetzee for her rewriting of a classic novel (in Coetzee’s case, Robinson Crusoe; in Costello’s, Ulysses). The frame story allows Coetzee to share ideas while ...”

“... him almost painfully eager not to fall into this trap. Not for Brown the ghastly contortions of John Prescott, happy to scourge the Tories for their failings as husbands and fathers in the dog days of the Major administration, but equally happy to try it on himself when a comely employee fell his way. Yet this sort of hypocrisy doesn’t seem to bother ...”

“... concerned with South African politics. It has no evident connection with the Coetzee figure (‘John’ in the text), who is described as sharing a house with his father and spending most of his time not very usefully on repairing it. Certain passages italicised in the text are said by the biographer to be memoranda by Coetzee ‘himself’, perhaps as ...”

“... the remaining five stories (dated between 2004 and 2019) concern episodes in the life of Elizabeth Costello, the fictional Australian novelist who first surfaced in J.M. Coetzee’s work in 1997 and who has made intermittent appearances since then. Here, as elsewhere, she is the voice that speaks of man’s inhumanity to animals. ‘The Pole’, meanwhile, is ...”

“... which of them were homosexuals and so on, Cornish dodgily assuming, as did Andrew Boyle and John Costello before him, that homosexuality is itself a bond and that if two men can be shown to be homosexual the likelihood is that they’re sleeping together. So we trail down that road looking for cliques and coteries with even G.M. Trevelyan’s ...”

“... someone really insane to fix the economy’; but by the time he wrote about politics, profiling John McCain for Rolling Stone in 2000, he was basically a liberal Democrat.) His roommate Mark Costello became a lifelong confidant and sometime collaborator. (Costello is now a novelist in ...”

“... in character. ‘After retiring from UCT and settling in Adelaide,’ Kannemeyer writes, ‘John Coetzee became a far more relaxed person.’ One symptom of this relative relaxation is the emergence, or re-emergence, since 2002, of a playful, inscrutably teasing side to his writing. In the essays collected in Inner Workings (2007) a dry sense of humour ...”

“... one does: ‘When I was in graduate school I was startled to find this story’s source in The John Collier Reader, – or so I have always believed until this afternoon, when I first riffled, then paged carefully, front to back, back to front, through the local copy (Knopf, 1972) and discovered no trace of such a story anywhere in the book.’ But over ...”

“... the second part of a quasi-autobiographical trilogy, we are told that the book’s protagonist, John, ‘can see no reason why people need to dance’: Dancing makes sense only when it is interpreted as something else, something that people prefer not to admit. That something else is the real thing: the dance is merely a cover. Inviting a girl to dance ...”

“... remains firmly in the background; more strikingly, a recent book about the young Joyce by Peter Costello, which ends in 1914, provides much valuable new material about his Dublin background and youth but devotes only sixty of nearly four hundred pages to his time in Trieste. This has not gone unnoticed in Joyce’s temporarily adopted city. A map produced ...”

“... who can’t bear the chill that emanates from these works, especially Disgrace (1999), Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Slow Man (2005). The same chill can be picked up in Coetzee’s critical essays, where it is likely to appear as offhand authority. A poem by Paul Celan, we learn in the collection Inner Workings, ‘absorbs from the Surrealists everything ...”

“... The first seven minutes of Le Samouraï (1967), in which Alain Delon plays the hitman Jef Costello, unfold silently; the heist in Le Cercle rouge (1970) goes on for half an hour without a sound, until Yves Montand’s character disables the security system of a jewellery store with a single rifle shot. Men, almost always men, are quietly, diligently ...”