Michael Wood

There is something slightly wrong with the apparently impeccable Philadelphia Story. The film works so well for everyone – director, actors, audiences – that the flaw must be very slight, and perhaps even an advantage, a wrinkle that enhances the smoothness of the rest. But it’s there and it’s this. The heroine is bright, rich, funny, classy, but a little censorious...

“To put it far more crudely than the novel ever does: if you can drown in fame as easily as in the sea, if fame is a form of drowning, then what’s the difference between success and failure? This is a question, not a rhetorical way of suggesting there is no difference.”

A certain monotony characterises saints’ lives, at least when viewed from the outside, and the same goes for writers. The chosen career flattens out the visible differences. If it wasn’t for the lion who traditionally accompanies St Jerome, Italo Calvino suggests in The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973), you could hardly tell him from St Augustine. Both saints are often pictured...

It’s worth pausing over the thought of Mann as a Joyce in disguise, a Joyce masquerading as a Galsworthy, say. What would happen to a literary form like the novel if it was invisibly hollowed out rather than brilliantly exploded? Could there be a Modernism that looked like its opposite?

‘The mind is a scoundrel,’ Dostoevsky wrote in his notes for The Brothers Karamazov, ‘but stupidity is straight and honest.’ This wasn’t what he himself thought, or rather, it was only one of the things he thought. In the novel the line is given to Ivan Karamazov, who explains to his younger brother Alyosha that he began their conversation about religion...