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“... It is obvious that Isabel Allende’s novel about Chile, The House of the Spirits, has something about it that appeals to women readers: but I cannot imagine what that something is. ‘Magical realism’ is the vogue-word: but this seems to me a farrago of fantasy-triggers. I was astonished when Marina Warner asserted on television that the book ‘gives you an astonishing understanding of a political situation ...”

“... ever by a bunch of writers – a hundred or so well-known authors from 54 countries, not including Isabel Allende, Bob Dylan or Gabriel García Márquez, who admirably declined to vote. The Guardian did a vox pop. New Puritan about town Nicholas Blincoe rather proudly let slip that he’s read 81 of the top 100; smashing Mark Lawson (69) into a measly ...”

“... he reads from his new book and answers questions about sexual politics. Crowds stare in wonder as Isabel Allende reads from a new novel. After her reading she will sit at a table in a side stall and sign copies of her books. The queue to get her signature stretches into the next stall, where Thom Gunn is due to read, so we have to wait. There are maybe ...”

“... sighs of relief were heard in the meeting rooms of New York publishing houses when the novels of Isabel Allende first began appearing in English, so that her name could be added to that of Gabriel García Márquez and, um, Jorge Luis Borges, and a decades-old phenomenon combining certain characteristically Post-Modern elements with certain ...”

“... I was not in Chile on 11 September 1973, the day 25 years ago when the government of Salvador Allende was overthrown. I was sitting in the Guardian’s old building in the Grays Inn Road when the news came in over the wires, but could not immediately fly to Chile, having a longstanding engagement to drive my family from Sussex to Yorkshire to establish ...”