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“... to arbitrate between the claims of mental breadth and concentration. Reading Off the Rails by Lisa StAubin deTeran, however, a memoir in which she brings us up to date with her 35-year ‘lifetime of truancy and escape’, a career of spontaneously marrying, travelling and ...”

“... Lisa StAubin deTeran’s The Slow Train to Milan and Clare Boylan’s Holy Pictures share a subject – girls growing up to a world whose language is new to them – which demands close attention to the register of words and sentences, a measure of novelty and an enactment of surprise ...”

“... it seems nothing but a substitute. His model is literature – and of the most depressing, fin-de-siècle kind. Distant Relations asks to be admired for the quality of its settings (Toltec ruins in Mexico, Gabriel’s pavillon on the Place de la Concorde), for a style that has twilight ‘like a recumbent woman ...”

“... an Army intelligence officer and a suspected IRA sympathiser came to die together on the steps of St Patrick’s Cathedral. Two points are made in the book: that savage customs – to quote the epigraph, from the Colville Papers of 1717, chosen by Maurice Leitch for his novel Stamping Ground – ‘beget a corresponding darkness of the soul’; and that, in ...”

“... her dead and left her posed in her party clothes on a bed in the Hotel des Artistes, New York. Lisa StAubin deTeran prefaces her book with notes from Henry Grew Crosby’s curriculum vitae, lest we should lose track of biography in the bravura of Josephine’s recital: but ...”

“... thanks largely to the posthumous revelations about the Belgian-American literary theorist Paul de Man. But what about the ordinary people of the Low Countries? Hugo Claus’s The Sorrow of Belgium, a novel first published in Holland in 1983, presents a world in which collaboration with the Nazis is made to seem as inevitable as breathing. The ...”