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“... of climate and fresh air and exercise. Williamson’s footnote for this points us to page 50 of Maria Esther Vázquez’s Borges: Esplendor y Derrota (1996). Vázquez had known Borges well, but this is no excuse for her account of the aftermath of his visit to the brothel: ‘He had such a terrible crisis that he cried for three successive days; he did not ...”

“... voice, the dear voice of my father,who comes back now, who never has been dead.Borges’s widow, Maria Kodama, has criticised Parini’s ‘story’ as ‘untrue’, and says it ‘should be understood as fiction’. Some of the book’s North American reviewers treated it as straightforward memoir; others regarded it as a novel. Ian McEwan rightly sees ...”

“... Borges died on 14 June, in Geneva – which bare fact virtually calls for an ‘English papers please copy,’ as they used to say, so complacently scant and grudging were the notices which we were given to read at the time. There was much Englishness about him, starting with his mother’s family, which was English, but obvious also in the plain way that he wrote, and in the humour with which he used to deprecate his own high literary standing ...”

“... Argentina, when he seems to have felt he had to choose between his new companion (and later wife) Maria Kodama and his old friends. Bioy’s diary records, with disciplined pathos, a last phone call from Geneva in May 1986: Borges’s voice came on and I asked him how he was. He replied: ‘Not too bad’ [‘Regular, no más’]. ‘I would love to see ...”