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“... Withholding indentation can amount to an assertion of seriousness and ambition, as it does in Thomas Bernhard’s Correction. That novel, written in two enormous paragraphs of equal size, multiplies the rebarbative look of a single unindented page to convey, as if there was any doubt, that mere entertainment is not on the menu. Roberto Bolaño’s By ...”

“... himself would make more sense. In a discussion​ of literary brothers Theroux mentions not just Thomas and Heinrich Mann and James and Stanislaus Joyce but Vidia and Shiva Naipaul, ‘both of whom I’d known’. At this moment the notional Jay Justus completely disappears within Paul Theroux, who had a famous if not ...”

“... Venice (Consul Smith, who promoted the careers of Canaletto and other artists), Florence (Horace Mann, whose letters to Horace Walpole are famous) and Naples (Sir William Hamilton). There were political refugees, notably Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, and his brother, the Cardinal Duke of York (who was born in Rome and left only once to go to ...”

“... own, reading Mr Nice’), and each puns both with the other and with a sort of hidden third – Mann, of course, and his great tale of ageing and disavowal and the ‘longing to travel . . . beneath a reeking sky’. Some echoes are explicit: crumbling buildings, ashy water, return legs of journeys mysteriously mislaid. Others are more subtle, to do with ...”

“... to his earlier and more successful populariastion of Luther, Here I Stand (1950), and Margaret Mann Phillips, pupil of the great French Reformation scholar Renaudet. She also did first-rate, first-hand work on the Adages. Her Erasmus and the Northern Renaissance (1949) was middle-of-the-road, dividing Erasmus neatly into categories, but dealing with all ...”

“... reading prose in translation – have you done much of that?Yes, I read a fair amount early on – Thomas Mann, for example, and I’ve had flirtations with the likes of Camus, and so on. But I’m not a great reader of foreign literature. These days, alas, I mostly read what I get sent to review. I’m all too aware of missing out on vast areas of verbal ...”

“... of his reputation. In 1929, on his 70th birthday, he received a Festschrift, with tributes from Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Musil, Schoenberg, Herman Hesse, Gorky, the first President of Czechoslovakia, Tomás Masaryk, and Gide. Five years later, in 1934, he received tributes only from Goebbels and from a crowd of lesser ...”

“... musicians from Central Europe.The boldest bid to claim Wagner for anti-fascist purposes was Thomas Mann’s lecture at the Concertgebouw in February 1933. For Ross, Mann’s ‘entire oeuvre is a kind of aftermath of Wagner’, with Hanno Buddenbrook and Gustav von Aschenbach avatars of intolerable Wagnerian ...”

“... of humour, and for some of its enormous length, JR suggests that Gaddis might succeed in joining Mann and Naipaul in that strange and frosty club.The opening sentence of the book is admirably focused and efficient (‘ – Money … ? in a voice that rustled.’) and the whole first scene has a welcome if oblique element of exposition. The lawyer Coen needs ...”

“... to infections that were thought, in industrialised countries, to be things of the past. As Lewis Thomas points out in his contribution to In Time of Plague, it gives us a glimpse of how most people in the world have always died: painfully, usually at an early age. And Aids, in another sense, returns us to the condition of our more recent forebears: it undoes ...”

“... a pantomime dragon and Siegfried squeezed Brynhilde’s breasts while warbling ‘Das ist kein Mann.’ Yet his outrage at Wagner’s irreverence was overblown (after all, he named the topiary dragon in his Kelmscott garden Fafnir). Wagner and Morris both cast their Volsung heroes as slayers of a sick bourgeoisie. Sigurd is the ‘Wild-thing ...”

“... story of Mrs Heidegger turning a visitor away from the door with the excuse: ‘Jetzt denkt mein Mann.’ ‘My husband is thinking now.’) Clearly, their lives together weren’t easy. She married a wounded man desperate to purge himself of his trauma; he needed to talk; she listened; she got him through it all. Then came almost thirty years in which he ...”

“... of Moscow’s sphere of influence. The Africa-America Institute, for example, which sent Horace Mann Bond (president of Nkrumah’s alma mater, Lincoln University) to the conference, was a CIA front.The USSR was entering a period of renewed enthusiasm for the Third World. The break with Stalinism that was marked by Khrushchev’s secret speech at the 20th ...”

“... produced unpredictable surges that were seen in every insurgent city. ‘Fear,’ wrote Emile Thomas, the architect of the National Workshops in Paris and later a zealous Bonapartist, ‘has been the presiding emotion of our revolution.’Liberal leaders feared they might be unable to control the social energies released by the revolution. People of ...”

“... in March he went on to Coleridge, Chaucer, Fielding and Petronius, and then had a go at Proust, Mann, Boswell and David Hume. He took a turn through French literature then doubled back to the English Romantics. He read Cicero and Virgil, Gibbon and Congreve, Goethe and Nestroy, Machiavelli and Hobbes, Gerard Manley Hopkins and ...”