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“... In The Devil in the Flesh, Raymond Radiguet’s novel of 1923, there are no machine guns, no trenches, no clumsy helmets or Five-Nines. At one point there’s some fighting several kilometres away, but the sound of artillery fire is audible only briefly. All the totems of First World War literature are absent, and yet the most interesting thing about the book is that it is even so a story about the war ...”

“... to ‘a’? Quoting the same sentence in his preface to the full set of new translations, Christopher Prendergast writes: ‘all paradises are lost paradises.’ This is impeccably aphoristic, and assumes that false paradises are just not paradises at all. Proust himself could be more accommodating, and at one point implies that almost anything may be ...”

“... something of a party game. To my knowledge, there are five versions currently on offer. Scott Moncrieff renders it as ‘For a long time I used to go to bed early.’ Terence Kilmartin reproduced this in his revised translation, but Enright, in his revision of Kilmartin, has altered ‘used to go’ to ‘would go’. In addition, James Grieve’s ...”

“... of chance involved in all this. [Brian Nelson]It’s true that the first English version, Scott Moncrieff’s, has ‘There is a large element of hazard in these matters,’ but this has to be a mistake, or a visit from a linguistic false friend, since hasard is the ordinary French word for ‘chance’. A happy mistake, of course. The game of involuntary ...”

“... Jamesian of Wharton’s novels: not only in its use of the international theme or the echoes of Christopher Newman and Isabel Archer in the naming of its protagonist, but in the implicit argument that the imagination of fulfilment may be superior to the experience itself. ‘It’s more real to me here than if I went up,’ Archer thinks as he pictures the ...”