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“... the urban masses of Paris, even though those masses are nowhere actually present in his work. Bertolt Brecht thought that realism was a matter of a work’s effects, not of whether it recalled something familiar. According to this theory, realism is a relationship between the artwork and its audience, in which case your play can be realistic on ...”

“... of dress version of workwear (which, McDowell notes, ‘possesses true integrity and power’). Bertolt Brecht sits forward at a piano, close-cropped, young, in a close-fitting lapel-less leather jacket, and, with a fat capitalist’s cigar between his teeth, seems to be enjoying the slightly preposterous pantomime of his own fashion statement. Not ...”

“... If you want to discuss Shakespeare, you have to depend on reading and seeing his work. Not so with Brecht. Not only did he write a great deal of commentary himself. All those who knew him well were impressed, and by now almost every one of them has written a book or articles about him, or at least had one ghost-written. New biographies and studies keep ...”

“... in the knowledge that they were a bunch of dopeheads and deadlegs. Just as the theatre of Bertolt Brecht was made possible by the existence of a mass socialist movement, so Yeats’s poetic enterprise was enabled by the tide of revolutionary nationalism in Ireland, of which he was the self-appointed mythologer. Whatever his doubts about the ...”

“... He or she is not a sign of that future, but of how much it takes to achieve it. As a poem by Bertolt Brecht comments: ‘Oh we who tried to lay the ground for friendship/ Could not ourselves be friendly.’ Similarly, the monk or religious celibate is no image of heaven, just a dramatic signifier of how much, in an unjust world, will have to be ...”

“... the World in 80 Days. Only a handful of tepid Cole Porter songs remain of this gigantic flop, but Bertolt Brecht called it ‘the greatest thing I have seen in American theatre’. (He and Charles Laughton hoped in vain that Welles would direct their 1947 production of Galileo.) By the mid-1940s, Welles regarded Hollywood as a place where he made money ...”

“... a blow from which German science has never recovered. Individuals such as Arnold Schoenberg, Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann, along with cultural institutions like the Frankfurt School and the Bauhaus, benefited the countries to which they fled, leaving Germany a cultural desert. For Blackbourn​ , the origins of Nazism can be located not in the ...”

“... Mr Carter well knows that to call Manning Clark an imperialist historian is like saying that Bertolt Brecht had a crush on the Duchess of Windsor. But big ideas go beyond what the mind that hatches them knows: they fly into the realm where thought is pure. Mr Carter has got himself convinced that even though a historian might be a radical, the ...”

“... Earl Robinson and Aaron Copland. The Collective took its cue from the militant anthems of Bertolt Brecht and Hans Eisler, composing American versions of 12-tone protest songs: ‘The Strange Funeral at Braddock’ gives the full Modernist treatment to Mike Gold’s meditation on the accidental death of a Czech immigrant worker in the steel mills ...”

“... of a well-known work should be intelligible, of course, but it must also strive for what Bertolt Brecht called a Verfremdungseffekt, or alienation effect, so that the reader doesn’t get too complacent. Marx meant Capital to read as if it were a pedagogical exercise in dispelling illusion, penetrating the veil that bourgeois economists (chiefly ...”

“... have been familiar with in the 1990s. That same decade, Brimelow was already channelling his inner Bertolt Brecht to complain that US immigration policy meant the federal government ‘is literally dissolving the people and electing a new one’, which is more or less how Trump thinks Biden stole the 2020 presidential election (dead people and illegals on ...”

“... character in 1970s West Germany – ‘a tabloid figure’, as Penman puts it, an ‘amalgam of Bertolt Brecht, Joe Orton, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Sid Vicious and Orson Welles’. By 1978, when he made his contribution to Germany in Autumn, a portmanteau film about the crisis caused by the Red Army Faction’s final, suicidal actions, he was famous enough ...”

“... of the Third Reich, the defeat of European humanism, the Second World War and its aftermath. Even Bertolt Brecht, little given to public self-doubt or literary self-deprecation, questions (in the most famous of the Svendborg Poems of 1939) any man’s right to equanimity in an age when A conversation about trees is almost a crime Because it implies ...”

“... Auden, Sergei Eisenstein, Hanns Eisler, Arnold Schoenberg, Lionel Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel and Bertolt Brecht rubbed shoulders with Peter Lorre, Charles Laughton, Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx and many others. Brecht and Christopher Isherwood had briefly lived and worked in ...”

“... He also took part in a concert in celebration of the Austrian composer Hanns Eisler, an ally of Bertolt Brecht, whose music had been outlawed by the Nazis. But throughout this period of political commitment his own music slowed to a trickle.There was an apparent incompatibility between Tippett’s advocacy of violent insurrection, on the one hand, and ...”