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“... Japanese. In general, the translators provide a crisp, matter-of-fact version without nonsense. Don Sanderson seems to me to have done a very able job (Vols II and III). David Chibbett (Vol. I) is another matter. He (or the author) has apparently set the style for names. We are given Onono Komachi and Ariwarano Narihira, which is rather like Johann ...”

“... the script. He looks at me inquiringly, then puts a straight line through half a page. ‘Boring, don’t you think? Too tentative.’ He invariably crosses out all my ‘possiblys’ and ‘perhapses’. Sometimes I resent seeing a day’s work crossed out at a stroke (except that I can generally salvage it for something else). It is like having one’s ...”

“... returned in chains to Henri IV. His successor, Henry Lello, was less competent: the merchant John Sanderson commented that during his first address to the sultan, he stood ‘like a modest midwife, and began a trembling speech in English … sounding like the squeaking of a goose divided into semiquavers’. Brotton​ assembles a panoply of perspectives and ...”