Richard Dury notes four distinct periods: lifetime reception; height of esteem (1894–1914); revision; reinstatement. The death notice in the Illustrated London News of 22 December 1894 shows how highly regarded Stevenson was: ‘He is gone, our Prince of storytellers – such a Prince . . . with the insatiable taste for weird adventure, for diablerie, for a strange mixture of metaphysics and romance.’ Ever since the sensational success of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Stevenson had been in demand. He commanded considerable fees from magazines such as Scribner’s for some of the essays in this volume. Following his death, serious critics elevated his work and dreamy readers romanticised the noble Bohemian invalid who died young. Jack London, who visited Stevenson’s grave in 1908, wrote to a friend: ‘I do join you, heartily, in admiration of Robert Louis Stevenson. What an example he was of application and self-development! As a storyteller there isn’t his equal; the same thing might almost be said of his essays.’

During the revisionist period, Stevenson was often treated with disdain, and was as good as expelled from the literary canon. In 1924 Leonard Woolf published an essay entitled ‘The Fall of Stevenson’, in which he wrote: ‘there never has been a more headlong fall in a writer’s reputation . . . A false style tells most fatally against a writer when, as with Stevenson, he has nothing original to say.’ This is hardly justified. And yet an aversion towards Stevenson’s writings became strangely commonplace for a while. Edwin Muir, Stevenson’s compatriot, wrote in 1931: ‘Stevenson has simply fallen out of the procession. He is still read by the vulgar, but he has joined the band of writers on whom, by tacit consent, the serious critics have nothing to say.’

In the twenty-first century, however, critics are once again taking a more enlightened and understanding approach to Stevenson. He has been included in the Norton Anthology of English Literature (after being omitted from the first seven editions of that influential anthology) and is hailed by some critics as anticipating elements of modernism and postmodernism. It is tempting to wonder how Stevenson’s reputation might have been rehabilitated, at least in the Spanish-speaking world, had the present anthology appeared as and when Borges and Bioy had first (or indeed subsequently) tried to publish it. Perhaps it is enough that writers as diverse as Isak Dinesen, Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, Kurt Vonnegut and Margaret Atwood have voiced their admiration for Stevenson.

To some extent, Borges’s reputation has also been contradictory. Never easy to categorise at the best of times, Borges described himself as ‘a Conservative’, but his opinions were, as befitted his sense of self, changeable. He was anti-Fascist, anti-Communist, anti-Marxist, anti-Peronist. When he worked at the Miguel Cané municipal library (for which he procured many great works of literature in the English language, books by Stevenson among them), he was unceremoniously relieved of his duties because of political remarks he made and was instead appointed poultry inspector (!); he resigned immediately. Borges’s reputation within Argentina received a major boost when, in 1961, he was jointly awarded the Prix International with Samuel Beckett. This prize also lead to greater recognition internationally and Borges came to be treated with reverence on the world stage. In some places Borges was perceived to be something of a counter-cultural figure; his image (on a book) appears in the infamous Donald Cammell/Nicolas Roeg film Performance, which Cammell claims was influenced by the Argentine. Borges was later to stir up controversy by making strong statements against Marxist and Communist writers, and it is reasonable to acknowledge that Borges’s divisive political viewpoints had a bearing on his standing as a writer. When, in July 1985, Borges attended a trial and discovered that ‘gentlemen’ with whom he had lunched were responsible for the kidnapping, the torture and the ‘disappearing’ of many thousands of innocent citizens, he had to leave the courtroom, feeling physically sick.

Many people know and are bemused by his assessment of the Falklands/Malvinas conflict (‘Two bald men fighting over a comb’) but less well known and less well understood is his declaration that General Galtieri and Margaret Thatcher were one and the same person.

Writers who evidence such a profound eccentricity of thought often make for compelling reading. Borges, like Stevenson, combines tenacity and magic to create narratives that alter the way we read the world, each other, and literature itself. One of Borges’s wittiest, strangest and most unshakeable stories is ‘Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote’. Melding fantasy, humour and erudition, the short essayistic tale concerns Menard’s ambition to rewrite Don Quixote, word for word, from scratch.