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“... moment, every advantage’. Paradoxically, the same would be true of the literary personality of Elias Canetti. Behind its approachable modesty, its avoidance of every publicity and image-making process, there is a loftiness, an assurance, a stance of absolute superiority. Indeed the modesty and the dignity make the same point: why make a fuss about ...”

“... At the beginning of the third volume of his autobiography, Elias Canetti is still in his twenties. He has been cooped up for a year in a bed-sitter on the outskirts of Vienna with only a print of the Isenheim altar as company, working on the grim novel that was eventually to be called Auto da Fé. Early one morning he catches the first workman’s train into town, dashes through empty streets and lets himself into the apartment of his loved one, later his wife, Veza – she has given him a latchkey against such an eventuality ...”

“... In The Conscience of Words Elias Canetti has collected 15 mainly literary essays and addresses written between 1964 and 1975 (the German edition, first published in 1975, contained a slightly different selection). The Human Province (first published in 1973) consists of aphorisms and reflections from Canetti’s notebooks, most of them written while he was working on Crowds and Power (1960), which he regards as his most important contribution to 20th-century thought ...”

“... Jump-cut to the present. Cabrera Infante is now living in London, almost completely ignored, like Elias Canetti before him, by the capital’s lovers of literature: however, his acclaimed novel Three Trapped Tigers has at last been published in England; a mere 13 years after its completion. In paperback, too: a snip at under three pounds. Hurry while ...”

“... meets everyone from James Dean, ‘one of the first people to encourage my art’, to Elias Canetti, ‘the writer of Auto da Fé, with whom I drank cups of coffee in the cafés of Hampstead, while discussing the merits of Chinese civilisation’.) Demos finds something facile in nomadic cosmopolitanism, relating it to the ‘triumphalist ...”

“... be. They would be gratified by the retrospective confirmation of their theses in autobiographies. Elias Canetti, born in Bulgaria, was even less of Vienna than those who were Habsburg citizens. But when he arrived there at the age of 19 he soon acclimatised: ‘The young people I associated with hadn’t been to war. But they all attended Karl Kraus’s ...”

“... and merge, if the distinction between them is repealed, then discord will follow. He observes of Elias Canetti that in his earlier work, specifically Crowds and Power, his thought is uneasily located somewhere between extended metaphor and literal truth. In the manner of fiction, its arguments are ‘picturesque’; the particulars are tellingly ...”

“... him. In Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language, Daniel Heller-Roazen recounts a parallel story. Elias Canetti grew up in Bulgaria speaking Ladino, the ‘largely medieval Spanish of the Sephardim’. Bulgarian was the language used by the family servants. However, while Canetti, his family and friends spoke ...”

“... then he became a professional writer, got divorced and was hard-up. I consulted his old friend, Elias Canetti, who tells me: ‘In 1934/5, when Broch was working on the first draft, he used to speak of it as the Bergroman.’ The mountain novel, I suppose, though some have translated it as ‘the chthonic novel’: anyway, it suggests that the ...”

“... that character’s father, Rudolph Virag of Szombathely, and he has forgotten to restore to ‘Elias Cavetti’ his proper name, Elias Canetti. Minor details, indeed. As a song of the open road, Between the Woods and the Water is a lively, engaging book. On 1 April 1982, Jonathan Raban set out from Fowey Estuary in ...”

“... have experienced the force, the grandeur and beauty of that culture, which made the Bulgarian Jew Elias Canetti write in the middle of World War Two that ‘the language of my intellect will remain German,’ can fully realise what its loss meant. Only those whose surnames still record the Hessian, Swabian and Franconian villages and market-towns of ...”

“... Gogol loved his stories, Tolstoy knew some of them by heart, and Walter Benjamin, Heidegger and Elias Canetti have paid ardent tribute to them. The praise is well deserved. This Treasure Chest strikes me as quite a treasure; and the new edition, with its chaste green jacket and endpapers, spacious layout and most ‘speaking’ woodcut illustrations ...”

“... Franz Joseph Maximilian Maria Antonius Ignatius Lamoral, ninth Prince von Thurn & Taxis. As Elias Canetti has it in ‘The King-Proclaimer’, the first part of his Earwitness: It is touching to see her with forgotten kings, she never forgets them, she retains even the worst has-beens among them, writes to them, sends them suitable small ...”

“... reflected back at them, realer than real. ‘Since they were extreme, I regarded them as Truth,’ Elias Canetti wrote of Grosz’s pictures. ‘I didn’t see a single communist in blue overalls,’ Walter Benjamin wrote of his trip to Moscow in 1926, ‘but I did see some guys who could fit in any George Grosz album.’ ‘George Grosz’s caricatures ...”

“... de nos jours. The only time in my life I tried to do a Boswell was after an evening on which Elias Canetti had unexpectedly invited himself to supper with us alone. But when, the following morning, I looked through the notes of his conversation which I’d made before going to bed, I found myself quite incapable of reconstructing it. All I could ...”