His subjects range from the great eighteennth- and nieneteenth- century writers Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Ivan turgenev, to the great German modernists Rilke, Kafka and Musil, to the giants of late twentieth-century literature, among them Harry Mulisch, Joseph Brodsky, Jorge Luis Borges, Salman Rushdie, Amos Oz, Naguib Mahfouz, Nadine Gordimer and Doris Lessing.