In the New York Review of Books, Michael Greenberg says that Jorge Luis Borges, who is often remembered as a cosmopolitan intellectual, was in fact obsessed with Argentina’s frontier and its cult of machismo. Borges adored ancient Anglo-Saxon literature, with its emphasis on blood and spears, and he recoiled from Shakespeare, whose language was overwrought and tainted with French and Latin influences. The great intellectual was ruled by his gut.

– Brian Hurley