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“... reader and the book’s harrowing events. The prose, which appears in an elegant translation by Rosalind Harvey, retains a matter-of-factness, and in some places a synoptic quality (‘among many, many more’) that is rarely freighted with sadness or despair. One result is that the tumult of a doomed pregnancy and the insufficiencies of women’s ...”

“... Enrique Vila-Matas’s new novel centres on Bloomsday, the annual celebration in Dublin of the day on which Joyce’s Ulysses is set. Many nations celebrate mythical events, but Ireland commemorates a fictional one. It is as if Britain were to dedicate a feast day to Falstaff or to the Artful Dodger. For some in Ireland, Bloomsday is a useful alternative to memorialising the Easter Rising or the United Irish Insurrection: honouring uprisings against the British has been controversial ever since the shadow of the IRA hung over the country ...”

“... alternative bog of Highland myth. At least Kiernan does better on the Covenanters than his editor, Harvey Kaye, who thinks that what they were fighting for was the National Covenant of 1638 instead of the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643. I would not like to be dogmatic and state that confusing these two very different assertions is the biggest howler ...”

“... or any of nature’s other more minor confidences uncovered by the likes of Darwin or William Harvey. To learn the secret of life is to figure out that DNA has a double-helical structure. And while Perutz did not make that discovery, he did run the Cambridge research unit in which the most notorious episodes of the double-helix story took place – the ...”