Political, military and economic relations between Great Britain and Portugal have interested academics in the UK for a long time. Now the study of intellectual relations between the two countries is becoming fashionable. That is right, for those relations have existed since the Middle Ages, and have not been one-sided.

Eça de Queirós is a novelist whose work, especially his non-fiction, has an English dimension. Most of his work has been published in English and he has become the best-known classic Portuguese writer. Several of his novels and other works, including his journalistic articles, were translated – some rather badly – in the 1950s and 1960s, and in recent years a new series of far superior translations by Margaret Jull Costa has appeared. So the time is ripe for an English version of Teresa Pinto Coelho's most recent scholarly work, not least because the humour and charm of Eça's writing, even in texts about quite mundane subjects, never translated before, comes over well in the foreign language. There are generous quotations to encourage the reader to explore further.

Eça spent many years in England, as consul in Newcastle and later in Bristol. While in this country he learnt a lot, not so much about how to write novels, for which his models were, and remained, predominantly French, but how to be a journalist and, above all, how to edit reviews and magazines.