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“... signposted theme of La Goutte d’Or, first published in France in 1985 and now translated by Barbara Wright under the accurate but ill-judged title of The Golden Droplet (La Goutte d’Or is a place in the 18th Arrondissement of Paris, as well as a drop of gold). This is a gently juvenile book, a little sweet but not uncharming, hammy and didactic ...”

“... factor in this transatlantic shift has been the skill and commitment of his English translator, Barbara Wright, who has brought to Pinget’s work a well-deserved reputation for managing to translate the untranslatable – Albert-Birot and Queneau, to name only two. In her article on ‘The “Trials” of Translating Pinget’ in the current Review of ...”

“... murs lépreux questionnés par la lumiére, émergeait la face blême et bouffie de l’ennui.’ Barbara Wright surmounts the biggest problems in translating Tournier with idiomatic ease and inventiveness, so it’s odd to find her lapsing now and again into un-English Latinisms like ‘inexistence’ for inexistence, ‘marmoreal’ for marmoréen, or ...”

“... funny? There’s a good deal of larking around with stylistic levels, some of it agreeable enough. Barbara Wright’s translation reads racily and seems full of the appropriate inventiveness. One kind of joke is a species of do-it-yourself Pierce Egan slang: ‘He cheesed it presto, though, for John MacCormack had just split his skull with five bloodily ...”

“... translating Queneau’s books is a beastly task. Nevertheless, thanks in large part to the great Barbara Wright, he has been fairly well served in this respect. (Wright’s wry, no-nonsense prefaces to her translations are little masterpieces in themselves, full of brisk practicality: ‘All translation, without ...”

“... In an uncharacteristic moment of playfulness during her affair with Nelson Algren, Simone de Beauvoir called herself his ‘frog wife’. Although it echoed his tough-guy slang about their Paris-Chicago romance, the phrase has the ring of feminist fable. Like Hans Christian Andersen’s little mermaid, whose story Beauvoir wept over as a child, the frog wife is a changeling, unlike other women; pebbly and awkward, she cannot wed the prince ...”

“... poetry, so careful, compacted and rhythmical is it; the English of the later translations, done by Barbara Wright, is faithful in every respect, however, having had to pass the intimidating test of being read aloud to the author. Nathalie Sarraute has now become a Pléiade author in her own lifetime. That is exceptional; it’s high time the admiration ...”

“... Chinese regime and had played a leading part in securing the Geneva Accords. It was, as Patrick Wright puts it, ‘one of the last occasions, only two years before the Suez crisis, on which Britain exerted a decisive influence on international politics’. Zhou began to employ a ‘come and see’ strategy, inviting Western delegations to visit the ...”

“... is, inevitably, some talk of Beckett’s extra-marital amours, notably with Pamela Mitchell and Barbara Bray. It is admirably free of the gossipy and the titillating, although Knowlson’s sureness of touch deserts him on the topic of the young Beckett and prostitutes, his prose veering wildly between the disingenuously coy and the frankly sexist. Above ...”

“... de Gaulle was right after all, we are not ready for the Common Market, not on the A2 anyway.’ Barbara Castle, Labour’s minister for transport in the late 1960s, had refused to yield to Kentish requests that the M2 be extended all the way to Dover, but the bypasses were on the way by 28 June 1973, when the conservative MP for Canterbury, David ...”

“... James, the always reliable butler, deals with that, the illusion of a dedication to poetry. Adrian Wright, in this new biography, refers several times to Lehmann’s half-commitment (in spite of his energy) to the professional life he chose. Fieldhead was the magic enclosure to which, as an adult, he looked back, wishing that it might have been possible to sit ...”

“... the only black artist of his generation who felt liberated by Paris. Baldwin noted that Richard Wright considered it a ‘city of refuge’. Even Baldwin, who developed a much more jaundiced view of France, admitted that he could never bring himself to hate the French, because they had left him alone. As Paris Noir underscores, the city served as both ...”

“... building is, as Adolf Loos once had it, a crime. (People often say Roark was based on Frank Lloyd Wright, but there are no significant similarities. Rand and Wright did meet, though: she visited Taliesin and commissioned designs for a house, never to be built.) The thesis is an extreme version of the Modernist ...”

“... its way, albeit briefly, into the American best-seller lists, along with all those diets, cats and Barbara Cartland. What is more, this startling success has been accompanied by a sustained chorus of outraged disapproval from practically every US critic who is actually qualified to pass expert judgment on its contents. One may simple-mindedly attribute these ...”

“... You get another angle on how architects think in the exhibition of architects’ drawings from the Barbara Pine collection, at Sir John Soane’s Museum until 27 August. The most interesting and liveliest are sketches which take you close to the moment of invention. These, like the material at Tate Modern, are early moves, unresolved and sometimes ...”