Enrique Vila-Matas Montevideo Translated by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott 240pp. Yale University Press. £14.99 (US $27). “Words are poor mountaineers and poor miners”, lamented the young Franz Kaf

You wouldn’t guess from the cover design—three songbirds silhouetted over swatches of picturesque Englishness—but Catherine Clarke’s A History of England in 25 Poems hits one of its sweet spots with a

Blinding: The Left Wing Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu, trans. by ...

As we are ramshackle ramblers, Dieppe distracts us from our art tour of southwest France’s Languedoc-Roussillon. As if that’s not enough, we then border-hop between Catalonia and France, before detour

Catherine Clarke A History of England in 25 Poems400pp. Allen Lane. £25. Mark Forsyth Rhyme and ReasonA short history of poetry and people (forpeople who don’t usually read poetry)368pp. Allen & Unwin

Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz Berlin ShuffleTranslated by Philip Boehm256pp. Pushkin. £18.99. The exhumation of Alexander Boschwitz (1915–42) is one of the more pleasing literary stories of recent times.