John Sturrock (1930-2017) was an English critic, editor and translator. He spent many years at the Times Literary Supplement, where he was deputy editor. From 1993 until his death he was consulting editor of the London Review of Books. His particular job, over several decades, was carrying French writing and ideas across the Channel.
His own books followed that interest: a study of the French New Novel (1969), the edited volume Structuralism and Since (1980), The Language of Autobiography (1993) and the essay collection The Word from Paris. He also wrote The French Pyrenees, a book about a region. As a translator he took on Stendhal, Victor Hugo, Georges Perec and Proust. A TLS obituary remembered him as very English in manner, and as a critic who wrote with care about Barthes, Derrida and Foucault while keeping a private scepticism about them.
Borges was a lasting subject. Paper Tigers: The Ideal Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges came out from Oxford's Clarendon Press in 1977. When Borges died in 1986, Sturrock wrote a farewell for the London Review of Books, annoyed at how thin the British press notices had been. His connection to the book listed here is the introduction to the 1993 Everyman's Library edition of Ficciones. The stories are in Anthony Kerrigan's English version, with other translators.
Start with that edition of Ficciones. Read the stories first, then his introduction. If Borges's labyrinths and invented books leave you wanting a full-length argument, Paper Tigers is the next step. If the French side of his work interests you more, try The Word from Paris.
