In the Epilogue to his book 38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia (2026, First paperback edition [first publ. in hardback, 2025], London, Weidenfeld & Nicholson) Phillipe Sands recounts  attending a literary festival to promise an earlier book in Valparaiso and being addressed by a reader who had personal … More The most annoying trope in fictional or non-fictional art is that which pretends that, at the end of the book, everything is resolved. This is a blog on ’38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia’ by Philippe Sands which ends in the same ambiguity with which it started, like life itself. Part 2 of a 2 part blog series.

Some tropes are of such long established availability that they are, of themselves, self-mocking. The quest is one such, although I think you have to avoid slippage in calling everything a quest, like the great epics of Archaic Greece, for you cannot quest, or look for, something whose qualities are in some part already known, … More How could we do without the most annoying and ubiquitous of all the tropes in fiction; ‘the quest’.