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“... Mexico City​ , in the words of the critic Carlos Monsiváis, is ‘above all, too many people’. In Los rituales del caos (1995), Monsiváis summed up the ‘multitudes surrounding multitudes’: the swarms of cars, the street pedlars and fire eaters encircling them at traffic lights, the massed congregants at the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the millions of passengers crammed daily into the Metro ...”

“... not of Mexican nationalism, that Aztec should be revived. For much the same reasons, the MacAdam and Fuentes English translation of this anarchic, carnivalesque novel contains some virtuoso coinages which it is hard to imagine in the original Spanish. Fuentes’s genealogy for the novel in fact suggests a perpetual rivalry between two warring ...”

“... Mexican literature will be great because it’s literature, not because it’s Mexican,’ yelled Angel in Carlos Fuentes’s magnificent dystopia, Christopher Unborn. We may be on dodgy ground, then, lumping together two Mexican novels – one about the South American uprising of 1810 and one about the expulsion of the Jews from Spain at the end of the 15th century – but for the fact that both try to explain something about how Mexico got where it is today ...”

“... of Disquiet was translated into English four times in one year: in 1991, by Margaret Jull Costa, Alfred MacAdam, Ian Watson and Richard Zenith. The last of these texts started out as The Book of Disquietude, but the longer word was soon dropped. As Jull Costa says, desassossego can be rendered as ‘unease/disquiet/unrest/turmoil/anxiety’. The prefix ...”

“... All novels are historical novels, as my late teacher, Graham Hough, used to say; but some are more historical than others. Novelists can improve on history, and if they are Science Fiction writers they can anticipate it. History can be invented, but most novelists only do so within strict limits. According to Hough, they would tend to invent a Prime Minister but not a major political party, a provincial town but not a capital city ...”

“... Culture brings Freedom,’ José Marti once vaguely proclaimed. The attempt to make sense of this slogan during the Cuban revolution cost both these outstanding men – Franqui and Infante – their country. One of Fidel Castro’s closest comrades in the war against Batista, Carlos Franqui, came down with him from the Sierra as the bearded men took power; for the first five years after 1959 he was, more than any other single person, associated with the explosion of ‘revolutionary culture’ which amazed and moved Europe and the rebellious young of the Americas ...”

“... Juan Carlos Onetti, 84 years old and now a Spanish citizen, living in Madrid, is one of the most distinguished and most neglected of Latin American writers. He was born in Montevideo, but takes the idea of being an important Uruguayan author as something short of a compliment, even as a kind of joke. He hasn’t sought his neglect, but he has cultivated the neglect he found, made it part of his story ...”

“... Bishop had many devoted friends at Harvard (as Millier notes), ranging from Octavio Paz to William Alfred and Robert Fitzgerald, and in her writing courses found students whom she admired and liked, both male and female. She also found a new person to love, Alice Methfessel, the administrative assistant at Kirkland House (the student residence where Bishop was ...”