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“... version of The Book of Disquiet was translated into English four times in one year: in 1991, by Margaret JullCosta, Alfred MacAdam, Ian Watson and Richard Zenith. The last of these texts started out as The Book of Disquietude, but the longer word was soon dropped. As ...”

“... A Heart So White and Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me. All three are admirably translated by Margaret JullCosta, who not only catches the meanings of words with grace and precision, but gets rhythms of thought, and even better, rhythms of afterthought to carry over into English. Marías writes the kind of ...”

“... When I said I was moving from northern Spain to Seville, the same warning came from every northerner I knew: those Andalusians always act so friendly, but watch out, you can’t trust them. I found this puzzling, for the only thing I’d want to trust them to be was friendly, however superficially; I didn’t expect them to save my life, or even to keep my non-existent secrets ...”

“... crafted descriptions in Eça de Queirós’s masterly novel The Maias, extremely well rendered in Margaret JullCosta’s new translation. The novel is set in Lisbon in the 1870s: 1875 to 1878, to be precise, with a couple of flashbacks to establish the family history, and an epilogue placed in 1887, the year before ...”

“... Julio Llamazares’s novel The Yellow Rain, much praised and much bought when it was published in Spain 15 years ago, tells the story of Ainielle, a small, remote Pyrenean village in the final stages of its disappearance. One by one, the last families load what they can onto mule or mare and set off down the mountains in the hope of finding a less hardscrabble life somewhere else, abandoning their houses to woodworm and rust, and their remaining neighbours to an increasingly starved and shrunken existence ...”

“... whimsical recasting of the biblical materials. The first sentence of the book, an illustration of Margaret JullCosta’s deft translation, strikes this note: When the lord, also known as god, realised that adam and eve, although perfect in every outward aspect, could not utter a word or make even the most primitive ...”

“... him the film in which his double will first appear. The (old-fashioned) name Tertuliano is, in Margaret JullCosta’s translation, ‘most unusual’. In Portuguese it’s ‘nada comum’, which means the same thing, but has the advantage of chiming with everything in the book that is ‘common’ (and shared) or ...”

“... In one of literary history’s great instances of the pot calling the kettle black, Henry James complained of ‘the absence of spontaneity, the excess of reflection’ in George Eliot’s work. To other readers, of course, the proportion that Eliot – or even late James – sets up between narrative spontaneity (or action and event), on the one hand, and reflection or disquisition, on the other, seems harmonious and attractive, and it’s certainly easy enough to think of novels suffering from the opposite problem of lots of action and little thought ...”