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“... including an infant son, but there’s no mention of this in her prose: the most the translator Robert Chandler has dug up is a letter from 1946, when she was 74, in which she tells her eldest daughter that had she stayed in the marriage ‘it would have been the end of her.’ This sort of silence on personal things is quite typical: she never ...”

“... Robert Chandler writes: ‘Life and Fate is the true War and Peace of this century, the most complete portrait of Stalinist Russia that we have or are ever likely to have.’ Chandler, who has had the herculean task of making a good translation of this long, moving and very remarkable novel, puts forward that claim in his Introduction ...”

“... literature collected in Russia since the 1600s. A team of Anglo-American translators headed by Robert Chandler has now produced a collection of folktales superior to many of its Russian counterparts. Aiming to strike a balance between readability and completeness, Chandler has tried to represent nearly all of the ...”

“... As a young soldier in Germany at the end of the war I was dropped head first into two manifestations of the Third Reich which half a century later continue to exert a peculiar fascination. After two months in what became the Russian occupied zone, the field company to which I belonged was moved back to the Harz Mountains area. We were told we would henceforth be located in somewhere called Lebenstedt ...”

“... Towards the end of The Foundation Pit, our wandering hero pours a miscellany of inanimate objects onto the desk of the local Communist Party ‘activist’ and asks him to make an inventory of his findings. He had been round the village collecting every wretched cast-off object he could find, all the forgotten bits and pieces that had no name or identity, so Socialism could avenge them ...”

“...                               One woman Makes the rest look down. Wallace Stevens I’ve never much liked Tsvetaeva. A churlish way to begin: I do so simply because I think that, in not liking her very much, I am at one not only with much of her posterity but with almost all her contemporaries. On the way to hazarding some unpopular views, it is not bad to begin with one that is, if unacknowledged, widespread ...”

“... Celebrity Dissident Pass-the-Parcel.) In 1980 the book was published for the first time; in 1985, Robert Chandler’s fine English translation came out, and in 1988 Zhizn i Sudba was published in Russia. Its author did not live to see any of this. After the arrest of his book, Grossman wrote the superb novel Vsë Techët, available in English as Forever ...”

“... the most popular celebrities according to highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow tastes. Raymond Chandler and Marilyn Monroe were, as Chandler put it. ‘the only ones that made all three brows’. Chandler shattered cultural barriers with Philip Marlowe, private ...”

“... Happy Moscow, was never published in his lifetime, though it now has a fine English translation by Robert Chandler. The eponymous Moscow is a woman, not the city, though she floats around it doing some characteristic 1930s-Moscow things like parachute jumping (insouciantly lighting a cigarette in mid-flight) as well as having various dead-end love affairs ...”

“... gives a full account of Agatha Christie’s work, making even plot-summaries a joy to read. If Robert Barnard sometimes seems more astute than his subject, he’s delightfully appreciative of her strategies, of the right and proper use of character stereotypes, and of Mayhem Parva, her own special English village fantasy with its definitions of the middle ...”

“... polo player, expert in Chinese ceramics, former student of William James – whom Raymond Chandler regarded as ‘the most asinine character in detective fiction’, and on some level that’s probably the point. (‘I’m not Sherlock Holmes or Philo Vance,’ Marlowe says later on.) Even so, it’s surprising that Marlowe doesn’t know who Proust ...”

“... low life – and is tough to render into English. The various versions around are very different (Robert Chandler reprints William Edgerton’s). Translators have to give the same attention to minutiae as those metallurgists of Tula, while also communing with the writer and the work. Polizzotti is also part-cryptographer, Oulipian in tendency if not a ...”

“... Curtis Knight and later King Curtis. The New York idyll was interrupted by the arrival of Chas Chandler, a character not unlike Eddie Ginley’s brother in the movie Gumshoe. Bass-player for the Animals, Chandler was keen to lay down his instrument and take up the lucrative cross of rock star management. Hendrix was ...”

“... by Henry Luce; the Washington Post and Newsweek, run by Philip and then by Kay Graham; and the Chandler family’s Los Angeles Times. Beginning in the Thirties with President Roosevelt, who, more than any President before him, manipulated the newspapers and the new possibilities of radio (which President Hoover seldom used), the book is a survey of a ...”

“... Garry Winogrand, what could be done with ease and subtlety at home was harder to achieve abroad. Robert Frank worked in Britain between 1951 and 1953. Born in Switzerland but based in New York, he was still half-hoping his pictures would appeal to a magazine like Life but at the same time he was trying, as he wrote, to ‘break from the Traditional ...”