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“... When Jorge LuisBorges was dying in Geneva in 1986, a friend committed an elegant Freudian act of homage. He mentioned Borges’s book of poems The Golden Coin and was instantly corrected: The Iron Coin. The friend was embarrassed but Borges reassured him: ‘Don’t worry ...”

“... Borges died on 14 June, in Geneva – which bare fact virtually calls for an ‘English papers please copy,’ as they used to say, so complacently scant and grudging were the notices which we were given to read at the time. There was much Englishness about him, starting with his mother’s family, which was English, but obvious also in the plain way that he wrote, and in the humour with which he used to deprecate his own high literary standing ...”

“... Not everyone can be Whitman,’ Borges said in an interview in London long ago. He paused, pretending to reflect. ‘Not even Whitman could be Whitman.’ We knew Borges was only pretending to reflect because we recognised the joke and the timing as belonging so perfectly to him, a Borges short story in miniature, a shortest story ...”

“... Sometimes things are such that he does have to press on to give the Reply Churlish (‘Who’s Jorge LuisBorges?’), and the Reproof Valiant (What do you think about Mrs Thatcher? ‘Oh, I adore Mrs Thatcher’), and even the Countercheck Quarrelsome (‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, one doesn’t study poets!’). But ...”

“... as a way of killing the father off, showing his mother who was the real man in the household. Jorge LuisBorges was in Majorca in 1919, writing his first poems as his father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, was working on his only novel, which, like ...”

“... without the kind of sanction once provided by the Mosaic Law remained for ever intolerable. As Jorge LuisBorges puts it, in his introduction to the new translation by J.A. Underwood of the stories published in Kafka’s lifetime: ‘His stories ... presuppose a religious conscience, specifically a Jewish conscience ...”

“... and the distinguished, neatly making the distinction between the two: ‘Was it Clive James or Jorge LuisBorges, the famous Argentine poet, who pointed out that if we saw every leaf on the tree we would go mad?’ But it takes a talent of greater stamina and range to realise these skills over 184 pages, including ...”

“... as well as to echo it? A certain elegant resignation in the face of that task is written into Borges’s early collection of stories, done in collaboration with Adolfo Bioy-Casares, Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi. They are elaborate amusements of a buried life, though the Grass drawing in this case could as well show a hand reaching through bars as ...”

“... Nathaniel Hawthorne (‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’), Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, Jorge LuisBorges (‘The Gospel according to Mark’) might seem to point the other way – and all are included here. The effect of some could be said to hover over that debatable ground where delicious literary fear ...”

“... Arab town stumble and twist into a market square? In order, later, to present for the pleasure of Jorge LuisBorges the offspring of a labyrinth? Or as if many days, over and done with and torn from the calendar, had nevertheless survived their own passing to come together and shape another life – a night life, this ...”

“... but delinquent reprint of the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1902’, in which Bioy Cesares and Jorge LuisBorges discovered the first recorded reference to the land of Uqbar. But instead of, like Borges, writing a story about a fake reference book that invades the real ...”

“... a Nabokov, a John Berger, three Doris Lessings, a Gore Vidal, two John Barths, and the whole of Jorge LuisBorges.’ This impatience with literary artefacts means that he and Camilla are also veteran walkers-out at the theatre. ‘Before ten minutes of the first scene had elapsed we were up out of our seats ... We ...”

“... each day to more atrocious undertakings; soon there will be no one but soldiers and bandits. Jorge LuisBorges, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ John Bagot Glubb, a young lieutenant bearing wounds from the war in France, arrived in Mesopotamia in 1920. His assignment was to command armed patrols through the ...”

“... came to Stockholm to see a humble Latin get a literary prize (for being chummy with Castro) which Borges, another Latin though not so humble, didn’t get (for once visiting with Pinochet). All military men are alike but some Latin dictators are more catching than others. In his fifth column, the most unintentionally hilarious ever, Garcia Marquez appears at ...”

“... in revolt against an empire, a legend which is retold in narratives by Napoleon Bonaparte and Jorge LuisBorges, although it is never made explicit in the Voyages Extraordinaires. The prophet becomes an oppressor in the course of his revolt. This means (and the same is true for Williams) that Verne’s archetypal ...”