Don’t judge a book by the cover of the DVD of the film made of one of the author’s earlier efforts. I nearly made that mistake when Weidenfeld and Nicolson sent me a copy of The Wind from the East by Almudena Grandes (originally published as Los aires difíciles). All I knew of Grandes, I’m […]

The trailer for The Good Shepherd, the film about the formation of the CIA that opened in Britain this week, reminds me of a line from Isabel Allende’s wonderful memoir about Chile, My Invented Country, which I read recently. Allende recalls a joke popular in Latin America: Why are there no military coups in the […]