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“... saw the decline of the staunchly pacifist left (its most prominent intellectual supporter, Günter Grass, had said that a united Germany would inevitably turn into a ‘monster’). The group’s deepest fear was expressed on a steel-grey poster ominously announcing: ‘Germany is becoming more German.’ At the same time, the so-called New Right ...”

“... feels the need to say: “I am a proud Scot.”’ The bus party was an idea I had borrowed from Günter Grass. In 1964, during a particularly dreary West German election in which nobody dared to speak their mind, he herded writers and artists into a bus and led them round the small towns of northern Germany. His intention was first to ask people what ...”

“... Norman wasn’t well enough to do the event but he liked the idea of it, a joint event with Gunter Grass, which I chaired. Grass had just published a memoir called Peeling the Onion, an ill-judged little book in which he speaks of his youthful membership of the SS. The night before the event, ...”

“... place, preferring to live in West Berlin outside that dispensation, when not in outright exile. Günter Grass’s new novel, Eine weites Feld, proposes another solution, a more radical and scandalous one. The scandal predictably aroused the outrage of all those (and they were and are many) who thought that politics could now be abandoned once and for ...”

“... wife Camilla indulge in orgies of this: ‘We consigned to the flames or the waves one Gunter Grass, two John Fowles, a Nabokov, a John Berger, three Doris Lessings, a Gore Vidal, two John Barths, and the whole of Jorge Luis Borges.’ This impatience with literary artefacts means that he and Camilla are also veteran walkers-out at the theatre. ‘Before ...”

“... Since then, according to Gay, the noteworthy protagonists of the modern have dwindled in number. Günter Grass, Gabriel García Márquez: when they are gone, the last vestiges of the modern will be gone. But then comes the epilogue, with Gay’s trip to Bilbao, and in the embrace of Gehry’s brilliance he finds a glimmer of ...”

“... he has written elsewhere, extolling the commitment of figures such as Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll. And what became true later had, according to Craig, also been true earlier. The Politics of the Unpolitical performs a balancing act, praising the chosen writers of the decades before unification by criticising the ...”

“... is one of Germany’s leading public intellectuals. He belongs to the same generation as Günter Grass and Jürgen Habermas, although he has been less bien pensant, less predictable, than either. His early poetry, lyric verse with a strong political content, won him the Georg Büchner Prize and he is now widely regarded as Germany’s foremost ...”

“... country. It is partisan rather than diagnostic, and in comparison with radical satire of the kind Günter Grass brings to bear on modern Germany, Midnight’s Children may look inadequate to its subject. One recalls 18th-century satire, however, and the animus directed by Pope and Swift against some small, personal targets. There is satire that ...”

“... of novelists who prefer to say as little as repetitiously as possible. Butler says nothing about Günter Grass, nothing about the younger Latin American writers whom Gabriel Garcia Marquez plausibly described as the best alternative to the sterility of the nouveau roman. Thomas Pynchon appears only in lists of names, and Gravity’s Rainbow, arguably ...”

“... and begins to sound like J.B. Priestley at the wartime microphone: ‘In their new books’ Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll ‘have both turned into what in my childhood were called “worrits”. Since we can worry well enough for ourselves, and in any case lack no assistance or guidance from newspapers and television, this may strike us as ...”

“... Cold War’. In addition to Bradbury’s invented personages the conferees include Martin Amis, Günter Grass and Susan Sontag (she skips one of the later conferences in the narrative, on the grounds that there is something more interesting going on in Northern Italy). Bradbury’s Villa Barolo is funded by the American Magno Foundation – offspring ...”

“... incompletely harmonised, aspects of what, cumulatively, I appear to have stood for. A phrase by Günter Grass describes the predicament well: that of the ‘intellectual without mandate’. A complicated situation arose in late 1993 when, after seeming to be the approved voice of the Palestinian struggle, I wrote increasingly sharply of my ...”

“... into something called ‘magic realism’, this American speciality – whether adopted by Günter Grass or Salman Rushdie or the authors of the Latin American boom – has been promoted into a genuinely global genre, and we glimpse, outside the confines of an American Programme Era, the outlines of some wholly different world system of letters ...”

“... leaves that ludicrous enterprise in ruins, and he shows no hesitation about declaring Gunter Grass’s recipe-crammed novel, The Flounder, to be pretty thin fare; his own consumption of it, he confesses, was ‘spurred on by no other hunger than the puritanical craving to leave a clean plate’. Up until now, Updike has generally stayed away from his ...”