“... 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 ...”

“... performances of Druidic rites – again a form of nativist revival, and highly dubious. Elias Canetti wrote: ‘Folk tales can teach us what we can expect from the world.’ Those who oppose fairy-tales’ pretensions to universal and timeless truth find in the stories a record of specific, shared anxieties of a particular time and ...”

“... pay I had ever earned. Being on the clock was instructive in other ways too. In Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti speaks of the ‘sting’ that passes from person to person as commands and other assertions of power travel down through the social hierarchy. As a lifelong freelancer I’d never really felt this sting. I felt it now, and it was a shock. To ...”

“... false and empty – the whole thing a complete void’. In his memoir, The Play of the Eyes, Elias Canetti recalls a meeting with Zweig, who had come back to Vienna for two reasons: to get his teeth seen to, and to set up a new house that would publish his books. The next sentence is: ‘I believe nearly all his teeth were extracted.’ The ...”

“... essays in modern times, but the earlier Auto da Fé of 1966 (Montale must have been unaware that Elias Canetti had given the English version of Die Blendung that same title) is its necessary complement, being concerned with the question of mass culture – a question made more vexing for Montale by the fact that, although he didn’t like mass ...”

“... lady, the ruler.’ These sovereign qualities lasted long after her looks had faded. When Elias Canetti met her in 1933, he observed an ‘inebriated individual, who looked much older than she was’, large and overflowing, ‘with a cloying smile and bright, wide-open, glassy eyes’. Yet still she drew men to her, like mosquitoes around a ...”

“... with the then septuagenarian Edith Sitwell (a neighbour), and held court at a local café with Elias Canetti. A profile in the Guardian in 1970 reports her turning up in a purple trouser suit and a white sports car, before walking so briskly over Hampstead Heath that the interviewer has to run after her. If all this suggests something close to what ...”

“... probably have married, if things had gone on as they were going’. She looked for consolation to Elias Canetti, the dark counterpart to Steiner but also, in his attentiveness, his promiscuity and his power to enslave his lovers, a counterpart to Murdoch herself, or to what she might have been on the verge of becoming. He may have been the person who ...”

“... Musil disliked the wrong kind of talk. ‘He took no part in vague conversation,’ wrote Elias Canetti, who knew him in Vienna: ‘A discussion, he felt, should start from something precise and aim at something precise.’ Talk was too important to be thoughtlessly squandered. Why else would power fear talk and set it against action? The ...”

“... that the conductor occupies. Aside from the power dynamics of the role (famously condemned by Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power), there is in it an innocent, wild artlessness that can be exceptionally beautiful, telling us something unique about the nature of what music is. (Osip Mandelstam thought the conductor’s gestures, in figuring forth the ...”

“... either: Leonard Kauders (based on Franz Baermann Steiner) and Oswald and Inge Bergmann (based on Elias and Veza Canetti) refer him to a philanthropist who doesn’t offer any money, just a job at a wallpaper factory. Arthur is going broke for writing a book about deception, self-deception and persecution, while ...”

“... and has nothing particular to tell us about Egypt, Ghana or Tunis. One might as well claim that Elias Canetti’s account of his boyhood in Bulgaria was ‘the finest book ever written about the nature of the European continent and its people’. The Baroness, like Canetti, was much inclined to generalise about ...”

“... Under the Sign of Saturn (1980), made up of valedictory tributes to pantheon figures like Elias Canetti, Walter Benjamin, Antonin Artaud and Roland Barthes. This is when she began to overuse the word ‘exemplary’ and when elegy became her prevailing song. A more intimate tone marked the personal eulogy to the social theorist and activist Paul ...”

“... for, the cryptic, didactic, fragmented way in which he chose to speak. Leys approvingly quotes Elias Canetti’s remark that the Analects ‘strikes one as a modern book’. I find this puzzling unless Canetti was thinking – as I doubt whether he was – of the best-selling genre of self-help, personal growth ...”