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“... Your cool high-ceilinged life is naked as a stage, as if you’d taken an apartment where the set-designer of your dreams had recently moved out. It is a theatre after the première, filled up to emptiness with applause. I think of God the Almighty after the ball, sitting as you imagined him on the palace steps, asleep in his slippers and topper. Let there (he mumbles in his slumber, dreamy and calmly afraid) be light ...”

“... I dreamt I was the simple trusting boy who took his wicked teacher’s jealous hand and climbed the mountain. And the teacher said he had to go away, but he’d be back, and if I happened to be hungry, why, all I need do was eat the stones. His eyes were fine strokes of a calligrapher’s brush conveying messages I could not read (though how I longed to learn and understand ...”

“... detailed account. The oddness and formality of the writing make it feel like a translation, but Michael Hulse works very closely with Sebald in transforming the original German into English. I suspect that the translation from the German is remarkably good. It is as if the reader, too, is in exile, not permitted to wallow in easy, casual prose. Exile ...”

“... career. Since his retirement from the Civil Service, publications have come more frequently. Michael Schmidt, his colleague on PN Review, has promoted his work; and Donald Davie, in one of those hot flushes that make his criticism so unpredictable and exciting, has declared Sisson’s ‘The Usk’ to be ‘one of the great poems of our ...”

“... style of interesting poets like Peter Didsbury, John Ash, Pauline Stainer and one of the editors, Michael Hulse, is not particularly ‘democratic’, but playfully enigmatic and donnish. There is a tendency to think aloud with a somewhat creaky jauntiness, as if the poets were sharing secrets with their desks; It has been raining all day, and I found ...”

“... the fetching. More engaging is a visit to the village of Middleton, and to the poet and critic Michael Hamburger, whose dreams and memories might have been created expressly for this book. ‘Why it was that on my first visit to Michael’s house I instantly felt as if I lived or had once lived there, in every respect ...”

“... an impression of Sebald’s habitual tone – measured, reflective and beautifully served by Michael Hulse’s translation – but they illustrate his tact in a wider sense. It is only at this point in the book that we have finally been challenged by an explicit reference to the Holocaust, an event adumbrated by the other narratives, casting its ...”

“... part of The Emigrants, the first of Sebald’s novels to be translated from his native German (by Michael Hulse) and published in Britain, where Sebald has lived since 1966. In that episode, Sebald describes the life of Max Ferber (based loosely on the painter Frank Auerbach), a Jewish boy sent to England in 1939 to escape the Third Reich, in whose ...”

“... W.G. Sebald (say), whereas really it is Vertigo, a version of Sebald’s Schwindel. Gefühle. by Michael Hulse. In the Belfast poems, the movement of words from one place or voice to another is a focus of attention. Carson encourages us to see that the slightest transposition matters. When he writes, ‘Spokesman for censored political party spoke in ...”

“... his parents behind in Germany in 1939, when he escaped for England.When The Emigrants appeared in Michael Hulse’s English translation, in 1996, it was often described as a book about four victims of the Holocaust, which it was not – only two of the emigrants are direct victims. Because the book is deeply invested in questions of ...”