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“... You killed my character!’ Clarice Lispector said angrily to the nurse who stopped her from marching out of hospital the day before she died of ovarian cancer, aged 57, in 1977. The Brazilian writer and her characters had always been close, and it seems that self and creation had finally merged in her mind. Others had already made the connection ...”

“... Fred Vargas is a woman. Said to be the sixth best-selling author in France, she is unusual there in being a female crime writer, in contrast with women’s dominance of the genre in Britain. Vargas also writes like a woman, if that implies an interest in character, feeling and motive, rather than ‘brutality and eroticism’ (Queneau’s description of the polar – a contraction of policier – a genre inspired by the Série noire’s postwar translations of American crime novels ...”

“... He was a middle-aged had-been, returning in a flurry from his entrada into the Spanish Main with a crop of tall stories and a bag of glittery sand, to the yawns of Queen and country. More favoured courtiers sneered that he’d never been to Guiana at all. This repudiation persists, leaving Walter Ralegh as little more today than the cloak-and-pipe fellow who was dropped for the Earl of Essex ...”

“... Most people who are obsessive animal-lovers as children grow out of it. I didn’t. I still feel a helpless identification with most of them, and the scene in Apocalypse Now in which scurrying specks are bombed from helicopters simply made it harder for me to step on ants. So I find it difficult to justify my liking for the bullfight. My excuse – which, I should say, has never convinced anyone – is that of all our dealings with animals, bullfighting at its best seems the most dignified ...”

“... When I said I was moving from northern Spain to Seville, the same warning came from every northerner I knew: those Andalusians always act so friendly, but watch out, you can’t trust them. I found this puzzling, for the only thing I’d want to trust them to be was friendly, however superficially; I didn’t expect them to save my life, or even to keep my non-existent secrets ...”

“... There is a whiff of apology about the beginning of this book. Daphne du Maurier is known to be a trashy writer of escapist romance: you’re likely to find Jamaica Inn, Frenchman’s Creek and Rebecca in the teenage section, and the other titles practically nowhere – so why this ardent study? By the end of it, though, Nina Auerbach has achieved quite a rehabilitation ...”

“... Ever since 1956, when Fidel Castro left Veracruz for Santiago de Cuba like a conquistador in reverse, Mexican-Cuban relations have been a sensitive area. Cynical Mexicans might take the view that their government’s attitude is, or rather was, a matter of ‘I’ll support your revolution – and appear to take a stand against the US – if you don’t export it over here ...”

“... I wonder how many culture-pilgrims have journeyed to Martinique since Texaco won the Prix Goncourt in 1992, to see whether a shanty town of that name really exists. The novel may be a lush documentary or it may be a historical romance: we can’t be sure. In any case, it is likely to change the way we think about the lives and circumstances of millions of people living on the periphery of large cities in underdeveloped parts of the world ...”

“... Calvert Casey was born in Baltimore and raised in Havana. Calvert Casey was born in Havana and raised in Baltimore. American or Cuban, it’s the same ... The only certainty is that he was a writer.’ This is how Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who knew him as well as anyone did, got around the vagueness that still surrounds the early life of Calvert Casey, the cult author of 17 stories, a handful of critical articles and a poem ...”

“... extra seats in Parliament for its US residents. (Now that dual nationality is allowed, President Fox has proposed a similar move for the Mexican Congress, which would enfranchise ten million people.) The effects of such transnationalism are often ambiguous. It can lead to the reproduction of authoritarian, patriarchal structures in the land of ...”

“... Modern artist as con-man: Salvador Dalí. The phoniness of Dalí’s work from the late Thirties until his death in 1989 coincided with the period of his greatest notoriety and wealth. He threw political and aesthetic principle to the dogs, becoming a born-again supporter of Franco and a fervent monarchist in order to ensure his security after the defeat of the Spanish Republic, and spent the rest of his life as a salon jester of cosmic pretensions ...”

“... In The Long Dusk, Victor Serge’s novel about the fall of France, his alter ego Dr Ardatov escapes death just as the author did, on a boat out of Marseille in 1941. One of Ardatov’s companions, a much younger woman, Hilda, joins him on deck. She says something intense, he counters with something pompous. With a familiar irritation, she thinks: ‘I wish you were thirty years younger ...”

“... Martha Gellhorn, the war reporter and writer who feared nothing on earth so much as boredom, and hated the ‘kitchen of life’, was enamoured of a different drudgery – life’s cardboard boxes. She moved house obsessively from continent to continent, America to Europe, the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, back and forth: I daren’t venture an exact number of proper residences, but it’s more than a dozen, in almost as many countries ...”

“... At last a full-length biography of the Mexican painter and muralist Diego Rivera: a famously fat, genial, enigmatic and ruthless man, with the politician’s mix of idealism and opportunism; an artist on the loose in the public world who made his mark on the first half of the 20th century. Following Bertram Wolfe’s political portrait of 1939, most of the reassessments have lain hidden in scholarly monographs, and Rivera is chiefly remembered these days as the husband of Frida Kahlo, Gender Studies’ emblematic victim – not least because it was Rivera who received all the attention during their lifetime ...”

“... The Moneda Palace in Santiago is white, and remarkably small. I recognise it from photographs taken on 11 September 1973, in which the bombers close above seem small, too, like fat flies. I must once have seen this building and found it large – my father was British ambassador to Chile from 1961 to 1966. As children in Santiago we led supervised lives, between the garden, the Austin Princess and the Alliance Française school ...”