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“... the maskers seem to improvise witty or pathetic dialogue, according to an agreed storyline. D.M. Thomas remarks that he is indebted to Germaine Greer for supplying him with information about the tradition of the improvisatrici in Italy: he has constructed Swallow (‘the second,’ he says, ‘in a series of improvisational novels’) in the form of a story ...”

“... and function of hotels. After his world-beating Freudian serve with The White Hotel here is D.M. Thomas again, standing on the baseline at the start of his new novel in yet another hotel setting. The Soviet poet, Rozanov, is sharing his bed with a blind woman whom he has arranged to meet because he fancies a literally blind date, and she is a fervent admirer ...”

“... Lying together marks the end (one hopes) of a sequence of novels D.M. Thomas began in 1983 with Ararat. Now called in its entirety ‘Russian Nights’, the sequence has been a fluid thing. At various points Thomas projected a trilogy and a quartet. In the event, ‘Russian Nights’ has turned out to be five novels long ...”

“... I must declare an interest in this particular Thomas. Dylan, R.S., above all the heart-inscribed Edward – these I admire, respect, claim. D.M. I have had little luck with. Our relationship began with the publication some years ago of The Flute Player, a novel which, I had heard, concerned the life of Osip Mandelstam ...”

“... genius, on the other hand, tends to ripen with experience – to accumulate slowly. D.M. Thomas was told at the age of 25 by his ex-tutor John Bayley that he would be a late developer. The truth of Bayley’s remark has been demonstrated by the switch Thomas has made, in his forties, from poetry to prose, and ...”

“... a need for hope in Americans and in others, and much of that hope died with him. There is, as D.M. Thomas’s novel suggests, continuing disbelief – it can’t have happened, it is a bad dream or a mere movie, reality will pick up and go on again. There is the mythological investment in the Kennedys as a doomed dynasty, a notion which also appears in ...”

“... to be published in honour of the Goethe centenary in 1932. There are improbable moments in D.M. Thomas’s novel, but on the whole it shows tact and respect towards Freud. And The White Hotel isn’t only a case-history. Its heroine, Lisa Erdman, is more than the ‘Anna G.’ of Freud’s paper: she is also a representative child of her time, who lives ...”

“... cited Algarotti in a note: Pushkin’s various notes are not fully reproduced in D.M. Thomas’s new translation, nor in Sir Charles Johnston’s of 1981). But ambiguity has always surrounded the statue, along with its imperial subject. The city which stood for a modernised and liberalised Russia was said to have cost a hundred thousand lives in ...”

“... on the circuit, but scandalous when the poet was a woman. ‘Wow! I’ve kissed Sexton,’ D.M. Thomas recalled thinking of his brief encounter. More shocking than the lists of Sexton’s adulteries or Dr Orne’s release of her therapeutic tapes is the revelation that she had a long affair with her second psychiatrist, here called ‘Ollie Zweizung’. She ...”

“... Yvonne dear,’ his Aunt said, ‘won’t you do the introduction?’ ‘This is Nancy,’ Yvonne said. ‘This is Andy. This is Mildred. This is George. This is Isabella. This is Steve. This is Miss Lear. This is Remus and this is Caterina.’ She paused. ‘This is Peter,’ she said. Everybody laughed. One of the children threw a ball into the air and someone said something that sounded like ‘sport and game’ or ‘Fort Alane’ and everybody laughed again ...”

“... reviving the antiquated Hotel Majestic in Troubles; or, most notably now, The White Hotel of D.M. Thomas. The White Hotel, with its collocations of Freud and holocaust, looms large behind The Hotel New Hampshire, which has among its characters a Viennese Jew called Freud (Irving has some of Magritte’s pleasure in the surreal effect of incongruous ...”

“... parents having intercourse doggie fashion, and to which Freud traced his manifold symptoms, D.M. Thomas concluded: ‘though it may well not have been true it is beautiful: which means it has a different, deeper, kind of truth.’ The problems of collusion and self-deception set by phenomena like these suggest that it is not novel sociological perspectives ...”

“... Oedipus and the Sphinx, deep in the folds of the talking cure, Freud does not tell us. D.M. Thomas knew what we wanted to know and tried to give it to us. The White Hotel invents a fate for one of them, but the invention does not satisfy that part of us which wants the truth, which wants to know what really happened to them. The truth of their fate is ...”

“... them. Some of them are her own translations, others are by Antony Wood, A.D.P. Briggs and D.M. Thomas, all experienced and with idiosyncrasies of their own. The considerable variety in the way the translators work suits Pushkin’s own versatility. The lines Feinstein quotes from her own rendering of The Bronze Horseman demonstrate how plainly he could ...”

“... of something else.’ So it’s rather a blow to Barney to discover he’s a reincarnation of Thomas Hardy. The discovery comes about at a séance organised by Sharon in her bookshop, where, under the influence of a hypnotist, Barney finds himself recounting, in the first person, Hardy’s memory of watching the hanging of Martha Brown at Dorchester when ...”