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“... the many shadings between the two’, she might have attempted a similar compote in English, as Linda Coverdale does so well for School Days. Some of the blame for the chewing-gum cadences, both dull and grating, must fall on Réjouis’s co-translator, ‘an American who speaks almost no French’. The insensitivity takes many forms. To the metre and ...”

“... My Phantom Husband also has a different translator from Pig Tales – Helen Stevenson rather than Linda Coverdale – and suffers from uncomfortable moments. Translation, like contraception, is better if it is never felt. ‘Who had detained him on the streets of the suburb, which clumsy, garrulous neighbour?’ Bof. Safety rather than performance seems ...”

“... The bloodiness of the events of the Seventies in Cambodia, and the desperate nature of the refugee exodus, have been of such monstrous proportions as to hinder the emergence of detailed accounts about what really happened. Someth May and Molyda Szymusiak (this is her adopted name) are two Cambodians who lived through the Khmer Rouge years and eventually gained refuge in the West ...”

“... Penguin have used an A-team of translators – Bellos and Whiteside and Schwartz, Anthea Bell, Linda Coverdale, David Coward, Howard Curtis, William Hobson, Sian Reynolds, David Watson – but, or and, one of the remarkable features of the project is how consistent the tone is across the books. When you look at the range of tones and voices in the ...”

“... In Primo Levi’s memoir of Auschwitz If this is a man – written, he says, not ‘to formulate new accusations … rather, to furnish documentation for a quiet study of certain aspects of the human mind’ – there is an account that is a kind of accusation of a man Levi calls Henri. There are several character sketches of his fellow inmates, but the two pages on Henri are unusually troubled ...”

“... In the small hours of Monday, 11 January 1993, Luc Ladmiral, a GP in Voltaire-Ferney, a dormitory town for Geneva on the French side of the border, received a call to say that the house of his closest friend in the neighbouring town was in flames. When he got there, the firemen were bringing out the charred remains of the two children, Antoine (five) and Caroline (seven), and their mother Florence ...”

“... Hervé Guibert died on 27 December 1991 from complications resulting from an unsuccessful suicide attempt. He had been ill with Aids for several years and in 1990 had made a spectacular appearance on French television during which he’d discussed his illness and the book he’d written about it, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. The thousands of letters he received as a result encouraged him to write another book, The Compassion Protocol, and to participate in another prime-time interview ...”

“... A diary, Roland Barthes suggested, provokes in its writer not the tragic question, ‘Who am I?’ but the comic question: ‘Am I?’ This elegant and amused remark goes some way towards explaining why Barthes, who reflected much on his life and published a book called Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, should not have kept a diary. The comic question can’t be confronted, it can only be circumvented, played with, smiled at ...”

“... there is a depiction of a failing partnership in La Femme gelée (translated as A Frozen Woman by Linda Coverdale in 1995), the last novel she wrote, which was published in 1981 and is dedicated to Philippe. She began to write non-fiction with the book about her father in 1983, then wrote one about her mother, Une femme, in 1988 (translated as A ...”

“... over the partitions, requesting updates.Lulu Norman has done well by BineBine’s original, as Linda Coverdale did by Jelloun’s. Both books belong to a small corpus of detention narratives, fact and fiction, set in the Hassan era. Most, including Diouri’s memories of Dar el-Mokri, are stories we’d sooner set aside, but there are compelling ...”