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“... Once in an unguarded moment when I was trying to illustrate the unbounded nature of human vanity, I shamefacedly admitted to my daughter that I, too, outwardly so cool-headed and realistic about my slender talents, cherished in the back of my mind a dream of being awarded the Nobel Prize. I could see myself, I confessed, walking up an aisle of red plush carpet, flanked by applauding onlookers and heralded by fanfares, dressed in my best, blushing becomingly as I prepared to receive this the highest accolade currently available in the profession ...”

“... for the worse or, just as likely, for the better – by her life as one of his virgins. Amanda Prantera’s new novel is another piece of the jigsaw that historians have overlooked. In this case, there is one particular historian, Cassius Dio, who wrote a chronicle of ancient Rome in 80 volumes at the beginning of the third century AD. One of ...”

“... evil, ‘but funny and a little sad’. Flirting and singing are not, I should imagine, dangers Amanda Prantera worries herself about much when she sits down to write. Her first novel Strange Loop and now The Cabalist both give the impression that writing amuses her. Her writing certainly amuses me. And it is an amusement which isn’t funny, but ...”

“... most of Mungoshi’s pieces, as over Southern Africa as a whole, is an impenetrably cloudy future. Amanda Prantera’s Conversations with Lord Byron on Perversion, 162 years after his Lordship’s Death (another title that will infuriate cataloguers) has a neat premise. A super computer is programmed with every known fact about Byron: especially all the ...”

“... Among​ the leading Austrian writers of the postwar period, Marlen Haushofer is an unobtrusive presence. Where Bachmann and Bernhard, Handke and Jelinek all in their time achieved international recognition, Haushofer hung back, failing to take the chance, when it came, to break beyond Austrian borders, and, at her untimely death (she died of bone cancer in 1970, three weeks short of her fiftieth birthday), left a miscellany of work that has neither fallen into complete neglect nor settled into general acceptance ...”

“... up in that mountain valley, or of the scenes in another of her novels, Die Mansarde (translated by Amanda Prantera as My Loft Life), in which a deaf woman acts as a ‘therapist’ for a highly disturbed man who shouts out the story of some terrible crime in a confession she cannot hear. ‘Austria is a small world in which the big world holds its ...”