“... where, among others regularly passing the (obligatory) potatoes, were Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Carson McCullers, Lincoln Kirstein and Gipsy Rose Lee. When love comes to the confirmed bachelor old friends find it difficult to take. Chums winced to see T.S. Eliot spooning with wife No 2, smirked when they brazenly held hands, and there was a bit ...”

“... that ‘raison d’état can never be humanitarian.’ Zehrer’s prewar writing is discussed in Peter Köpf’s Schreiben nach jeder Richtung (1995) about the postwar West German press. Berghahn, however, doesn’t mention this book, and indeed seems almost completely ignorant of previous work in his field. He fails to overturn the verdict of another ...”

“... is not alone in thinking they can. The same assumption can be found in the work of Michael Mann, of which Runciman has been a severe critic, but whose scale and focus invite comparison. The common source of this bias is Weber – the dominant influence on this cohort of British sociologists. Fixation with power has, of course, gone much further ...”

“... and megabytes, and in his spare time, we are told, he ‘likes to read/ Eclectically from Mann to Bede’. If so, he reads merely from boredom, since it has no measurable effects upon his life. There could hardly be a more striking contrast with Pushkin’s characters. Onegin and his Tatyana may not have been great readers, but they were steeped in a ...”

“... proper to an artist. In The Golden Notebook and elsewhere, she mentions her admiration for Thomas Mann and for the idea of the philosophical novel, now, she believes, an impossibility; but even so she thinks one can still claim to be serious. Her right to make that claim is supported by her permanent interest in the world’s wickedness and injustice, which ...”

“... to work, they soon ground the life out of poetry: only the sturdier weed of propaganda was left. Peter Vansittart’s engrossing anthology, Voices from the Great War, brings out the ideological weakness and confusion that prevailed in the war, especially at the start. For some, the war gave proof of a long and deep sickness in European culture; for ...”

“... the first generation of German writers to whom writing seemed to offer a prosperous future. Thomas Mann, a friend of Wassermann’s, was teased for being a hartnäckiger Villenbesitzer, or ‘serial villa buyer’; Stefan Zweig owned Beethoven’s desk and Goethe’s pen; Hofmannsthal summed up his aspirations with a list of trophy comforts: ‘I finally want ...”

“... later call, applying the term to a very different kind of music, ‘entartete Kunst’. Thomas Mann was to satirise this attitude in Buddenbrooks, where Edmund Pfühl, the local organist, refuses to play excerpts from Tristan because of the music’s immorality: ‘I cannot play that, my dear lady!’ he says to Gerda, ‘I am your most devoted servant but ...”

“... but world leaders – Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt – also have their say as do Brecht, Hamsun, Mann and others. So much of​ Kempowski’s work is taken up with the Second World War, and/or with the history of his family, that Homeland initially looks like a departure: it’s not about his ancestors and it’s set at the time he was writing it, in the ...”

“... was confiscated by the Nazis after she published ‘one outspoken aggressive paragraph’ in Klaus Mann’s Die Sammlung in 1934), her connections gave her easy access throughout her life to houses, dinners, holidays, mates’ rates in the Nazi baronessa’s high-end Ischia B&B (‘One cannot think much, oddly enough, about the political angle once one is ...”

“... describes Kafka as ‘this non-breeder’. In Daniel Kehlmann’s German this is ‘nachwuchsloser Mann’, a man without descendants, literally without aftergrowth. In Julie Orringer’s English, based on Peter Esterházy’s Hungarian, Kafka becomes a ‘barren man’, which in Laurent Binet’s French becomes ‘cet homme ...”

“... London until his death in the summer of 1988.’ In 2002, after Sebald’s death, the translator Peter Filkins came across a copy of the German original of The Journey, the middle novel of a trilogy by Adler, in Schoenhof’s Foreign Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Filkins found a very different Adler from the chronicler who had inspired Sebald. Adler’s ...”

“... of the revolution.Further west, in Princeton, or much further, in Pacific Palisades, Thomas Mann and his family spent diverting evenings – this in 1939 – debating which of Zweig, Ludwig, Feuchtwanger and Remarque was the worst writer. Emil Ludwig himself, in an obituary, wrote that none of Zweig’s writings had affected him in a way that could ...”

“... theoretical approach to its subject. The title, suggested by Adorno’s friend and publisher Peter Suhrkamp, evokes a musical analogy in which a supportive accompaniment rather than conceptual domination of its subjects is the goal. Appropriately, the collection’s opening piece is a spirited defence of ‘The Essay as Form’ against the traditional ...”

“... Feinstein has clearly drawn from its current vitality, although she might prefer comparison with Mann and Lawrence rather than Howard Fast and Alex Haley. But whatever their literary elevation, these sagas tend to conform to the same narrative movement. At the beginning there is solidarity, togetherness, a spirit of one for all. Then younger members make ...”