The order was to be basically chronological, but not rigidly so. I found sequences that I wanted—the celebrated hotel series, from 1929, evidently, but also the tours of Russia and Albania, and some of the domestic pieces from the Ruhrgebiet and elsewhere. I liked the idea of little out-of-place hostages (the bubble of Yin in the Yang) in some of the sections: a hotel piece, the “Hotel Kopriva”, not in the hotel section; beginning the German section with something seen in Vienna; keeping a musical memory of the Volksgarten outside the Austria section, and a Russian piece (“The Opened Tomb”) outside that devoted to the USSR. To name just a few. Any order so long as it’s not too rigid. Half a dozen translations I ended up leaving out—the pieces weren’t bad, the translations were OK, there was just no good place for them. They would have weakened the whole. Coverage was an aim; geography, evidently, but also history: the Great War and its aftermath; the Inflation, reparations and partial French occupation; the constant unrest and instability in Weimar Germany; politics, crime, style; emigration and exile; Communism, Fascism and Hitlerism. I collected a plurality of pieces on such archetypally Rothian themes as train travel, spring (which surely is his season, nor has anyone written better about it), oil-wells, interior design and balconies. And there are singular pieces on two gypsy girls met on the street, on a German-speaking blond Negro Frenchman, on a musical clown, a near-matricide, a morphine murderess. A trio of pieces on Roth’s avatar and idol Heinrich Heine (another divided nature: German and Jew, poet and journalist, wit and agonist), the Austrian playwright Grillparzer, and a little known poet Eduard Samhaber represent Roth’s taste and interest in literature. “Furlough in Jablonovka” (published posthumously in September 1939, with the Second World War under way) takes one back to before the first piece about men and dogs: to 1914 and World War One. In other words, the form is an unending spiral.

It is my hope that these pieces will take the English reader closer to Roth than anything else he wrote. For once, there is no story, no dependable subject, no histrionics (as often in the letters, in an inextricable and worsening situation). He comes into these pieces as nowhere else: it is him walking the gypsy girls over the road; loosely impersonating a millionaire; making landfall in Albania (in that exquisite piece); checking in and out of his hotel “fatherland”; taking the tram ride from nowhere to nowhere, but getting a little closer all the time to the end of the world, in the Ruhr. It is his mind, his graceful spirit, his leaps and flights, his noticings that he parlays into pieces here. His supplying and ­withholding of contexts; his exaggerations and his subtlety; his irony, his humanity and his blank hatreds (say, of the nationalist duelling ­fraternity students). His modesty and his nettled arrogance (“Interviews are an alibi for a journalist’s lack of ideas”). His ­sublime gift for phrases (“Saint Petroleum”); the asperity and reasonableness of his conclusions (“That’s what is missing in Germany: the regulating consciousness”); his gorgeous tirades—

The colour of the age is white, laboratory white, as white as the room where they invented lewisite, white as a church, white as a bathroom, white as a dissecting room, white as steel and white as chalk, white as hygiene, white as a butcher’s apron, white as an operating table, white as death, and white as the age’s fear of death! Let’s brighten up the ceiling!—Because it is the age’s belief that white is cheerful. It wants by brightness to attract cheerful people. And the people are as merry as patients, and the present is as merry as a hospital.

—and his feline way with form: “The Wonders of Astrakhan” works like an auction: first the fish have it, then the flies, then, with a surprising late bid, the beggars. It is with his variable thoughts on exile, on monarchy, on literature, on the military, on nations, on East and West, that he regales us. He is capable of hanging a set of political opinions on a quirk of facial hair styling (“a large blond moustache that went out into a couple of butchers’ hooks”) and of turning a manicure into a threat (“a hand with flashing pink nails dangled over the chairback”); of inferring the state of the nation from a chance observation (the railway conductor wolfing chocolates), and of shrinking another nation into a natty synecdoche (“on the right a mosque, on the left a rudimentary café terrace where guests bake and fezzes talk”). He has at times a wonderfully simple, radical imagination: Grillparzer’s visit to Goethe (one of the great humiliations in literary history, and not the only one involving Goethe) is like Friday visiting Sunday, “and then going home, satisfied and sad that he was Friday”; the scene at Boryslav—the primitive oil-wells—makes him think of capitalism lurching into expressionism. A hotel can be either a canny form of post-national organization, taking its inspiration from the sadly defunct Dual Monarchy (“He is an Italian. The waiter is from Upper Austria. The porter is a Frenchman from Provence. The receptionist is from Normandy. The head waiter is Bavarian. The chambermaid is Swiss.