Just then, with a wink and a sly normal lurch,

'I'm an owl; you're another. Sir Critic, good day.' And the barber kept on shaving.

Oh, to be home again, home again, home again! Under the apple-boughs, down by the mill!

The skipper stormed and tore his hair, Hauled on his boots and roared at Marden- 'Nantucket's sunk and here we are Right over old Marm Hackett's garden!'

Bolano's narrative style is fragmented and loaded. It is also full of a strange kind of gallows humour, as we are swept along by stories that are invented and …

Ernest Bramah's China, then, is the fantastic bogus China of convention, not the real historical thing at all. He wrote of it in a prose so perfectly conceived…

I read Hemingway's posthumous Paris memoirs, rumoured to have been written by his wife (`Out of the question,' Toni assured me, `they're so badly written they …