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“... superiority that commands prestige, and abilities of which society cannot sanely deprive itself.Thomas Piketty quotes Boutmy’s proposition in Capital in the 21st Century (2013), the bestseller that made him a household name among today’s intellectual and business elite. According to Piketty – and it is hard to disagree – this ‘incredible ...”

“... of the worst thing you could do’. And here is Hardwick at the public library discovering Thomas Mann, whose Death in Venice has been mis-shelved in the murder mystery section. (A lesser woman would have put it back.) In 1934, she went to the University of Kentucky, where she sought out ‘the literary people and the political people’. ‘I ...”

“... East Coast filmmakers hurried West to seek maximum sunlight and maximum separation from Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company, which demanded copyright payment or else a bullet in the expensive newfangled movie cameras. The canyons and ravines of the Hollywood Hills were the natural redoubts against the Patents Company ...”

“... appearance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In Hellfire Nation the quintessential American statesman is not Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln, but the anti-smut campaigner Anthony Comstock. The Comstock Act of 1873 outlawed from the federal mail any ‘obscene, lewd or lascivious book, pamphlet, picture, paper, print or other publication of an indecent character or ...”

“... Irish, or Jewish: Melville, Whitman, Hopkins, James, Yeats, Kafka, Woolf, Joyce, Stein, Beckett, Mann, Proust, Gide, Firbank, Lorca, Cocteau, Auden, Forster, Cavafy. But he would have been slightly unsettled, I think, by the thought of the gay element in this list, and by the idea that in place of ‘Irish’ or ‘Jewish’ or ‘Argentine’ in his essay ...”

“... of Carpenter’s best stories, Auden’s marriage and more particularly its immediate aftermath. Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika – who though once-married was not very likely to marry again – was a cabaret artiste whose heroically anti-Nazi material had lost her her German passport, and who therefore approached the nearest Englishman, Christopher ...”

“... The Conservatives had a whole dynasty of them: Sir Arthur Forwood, Sir Archibald Salvidge and Sir Thomas White. Even Labour followed the example thus set, in the person of John Braddock, a founder member of the Communist Party who lapsed into respectability. Perhaps one should include his wife Bessie in the list. Equally special was the composition of the ...”

“... spoken again! I am practically back in Moscow.’ That denouncer of Dostoevsky, Doctor Zhivago, Thomas Mann, Faulkner, George Eliot, Klebnikov, War and Peace, Stendhal and Cervantes, Boyd explains, ‘particularly liked reading bad literature aloud – “I can’t stop quoting!” he would chortle with glee.’ His ebullience and self-delight were ...”

“... On 28 January 1754, Horace Walpole coined a pretty bauble of a word in a letter to Horace Mann, apropos of a happy discovery made while browsing in an old book of Venetian heraldry: Mann had just sent him the Vasari portrait of the Grand Duchess Bianca Capello, and Walpole stumbled on the Capello coat of arms ...”

“... of some is the exploitation of others, so that truly self-consistent liberals, the Thomas Manns and E.M Forsters of this world, must acknowledge the tainted roots of their own liberties. Besides, it is implausible to imagine in a post-Freudian age that the obstacles to our self-realisation are all conveniently on the outside. If they were ...”

“... sensibility’ always contained a European admixture, and Figes criticises those – Rilke, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf – who swallowed whole the myth of a completely indigenous ‘Russian soul’. All the great Russians ‘were Europeans too, and the two identities were intertwined and mutually dependent in a variety of ways’. Natasha’s ...”

“... of Okhrana agents, and Reilly signed on with Melville in 1896.Soon afterwards he met Margaret Thomas, the much younger Irish wife of a rich Welsh clergyman. Reverend Thomas died in March 1898, leaving his estate to his pregnant widow. In August that year, no longer pregnant, she married Sigmund Rosenblum at Holborn ...”

“... during another picnic, Huxley was strolling along Santa Monica beach with his wife, Maria, and Thomas and Katia Mann, when Maria pointed out some long white shapes moving in a vaguely suggestive fashion. Aldous saw them as flowers, blowing in the wind. Maria realised that they were condoms, thousands of them, spread ...”

“... Casals is probably worth 100,000. Picasso 50,000. Your trio [Feuchtwanger, Heinrich Mann and Franz Werfel] brought in 35,000. Since their arrival we have had nothing good to offer the public and they are pretty shopworn by this time. See if you can dig up something big. Marino gives most space to the Manns and the Werfels. For the crossing into ...”

“... benefit of the institute. The Warburg Institute’s advisory council, through its chairman, Keith Thomas, took a view similar to mine. Our protests did not have much effect, because it wasn’t until late in 2004 that the university even asked to see a copy of the deed, not being able to locate its own. By then the vice-chancellor, Graeme Davies, had already ...”