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“... In​ 1968, when not too many people outside Portugal had heard of Fernando Pessoa, now regarded as one of the great Modernist poets, the linguist Roman Jakobson, in collaboration with Luciana Stegagno-Picchio, wrote an essay centring on Pessoa’s use of oxymorons. The piece was a complex formal study of a poem from Mensagem (1934), the single volume of verse Pessoa published in Portuguese in his lifetime ...”

“... True originality,’ Cocteau, Pessoa’s contemporary, wrote, ‘consists in trying to behave like everybody else without succeeding.’ It was once characteristically modern to idealise originality, and to conceive of it as a form of failure. The fittest as those who didn’t fit. If there is nothing more compliant now than the wish to be original – to find one’s own voice etc – it is also assumed that originality and success can, and should, go together ...”

“... As​ he grew older, Fernando Pessoa became less visible, as though he were inexorably being subsumed by dreams and shadows. The French translator and scholar Pierre Hourcade, who visited Lisbon in 1933, remembered leaving a café with Pessoa, and walking with him for a few blocks ...”

“... end up at the harbor. Obrigado. And it’s off in a cab to Brasileira, the café in Chiado Where Fernando Pessoa spent so much time writing his immortal Multiple-personality-disorder poems, Now called Dissociated Identity Disorder. That’s where you find the statue. That’s where you pay homage. He sits at a little bronze table outdoors At the edge of ...”

“... a doubly fictional character, Saramago’s version of a figure invented by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, into the rainy, historical Lisbon of the Thirties, at the moment of Salazar’s accession to power. The bewildered ghost makes the material world seem palpably real and dense, far more unshakeable and present than realism usually manages to ...”

“... in 1883, was an insurance company employee whose literary work consists mostly of fragments; Fernando Pessoa, born in 1888, was a translator of commercial correspondence for an import-export house, whose literary legacy came in the form of snippets of paper stuffed in a chest. In the visual arts, the scrap of paper would make the collages of Kurt ...”

“... is scrupulous. The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1992) made semi-real one of the personas of Fernando Pessoa, a writer whose real name means ‘person’ and who wrote under four different aliases, for each of whom he invented a mini-biography and a set of temperamental tendencies. Pessoa disliked the word ...”

“... and reveals that he’s an alien before launching into a rambling disquisition about Buddhists and Fernando Pessoa, is half-baked. Still, the book captures the dispirited aimlessness of many recent college graduates in America as well as anything I’ve read. Eeeee Eee Eeee came out in 2007, a few months before Lin turned 24. Two years later a novella ...”

“... familiar, others (nunisme, instantanéisme, noucentisme, poetism, formism) more recherché. Fernando Pessoa may hold the record, with three original isms to his name: the relatively seminal Paulismo, as well as the non-starters Sensationism and Intersectionism. By the end of the 1910s, an ism backlash had begun. ‘As convenient descriptions we do ...”

“... but why should ‘Denis Diderot’ be closed down as one thing only? Certain writers – Fernando Pessoa, for instance, with all his aliases – have been truly intent on slicing up their identity. But most of the rest are a little blurry, a little multiple and overlapping. Listen to Tunstall herself in her conclusion, archly sidling up to ...”

“... alone.’ The cities in which they were alone were Lisbon, Buenos Aires, Dublin. The writers were Fernando Pessoa, born 1888, died 1935; Jorge Luis Borges, born 1899, died 1986; Flann O’Brien, born 1911, died 1966. Each of them was brought up not only in a shadow country and city, or a place that felt as though it lived now in the shade, but also with ...”

“... but the writer is not long for this world and anyway their relationship resembles that between Fernando Pessoa and his dying heteronym in Saramago’s Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis: male friendship is exempted from some of its ordinary difficulties when it can take place between two aspects of a single person. As for la jolie russe Olga, her bid ...”