His Own Sort of Outsider

Philip Clark: Tippett’s Knack, 16 July 2020

Michael Tippett: The Biography 
by Oliver Soden.
Weidenfeld, 750 pp., £25, April 2019, 978 1 4746 0602 8
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... 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 ...

A Fragment of Ibykos Translated Six Ways

Anne Carson, 8 November 2012

... not truly, if I would, if I could, [it] justifies my one whole lunatic escape. [fr. 286 as Bertolt Brecht’s FBI file #100-67077] At a cocktail party attended by known Communists, on the one hand, the subject being suitably paraphrased as Mr & Mrs Bert Brecht, where ten years of exile have left their ...

I Could Sleep with All of Them

Colm Tóibín: The Mann Family, 6 November 2008

In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story 
by Andrea Weiss.
Chicago, 302 pp., £14.50, May 2008, 978 0 226 88672 5
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... Papa, that the son of a genius is never a genius himself. Therefore, you can’t be a genius!’ Bertolt Brecht wrote: ‘The whole world knows Klaus Mann, the son of Thomas Mann. By the way, who is Thomas Mann?’ When The Magic Mountain appeared in 1924, Thomas Mann wrote in his son’s copy: ‘To my respected colleague – his promising ...

Diary

J.P. Stern: This great wall has fallen down, 7 December 1989

... the knowledge and experience of their daily lives: the knowledge and the experience that (to quote Brecht) ‘the measures taken’ to secure the workers’ paradise did not work. In the face of endless indoctrination to the contrary, people conceived the uncertain hope that social justice and the benefits of the welfare state can be separated from the ...