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“... inside the well-meaning, diffident adult there was a prodigious infant clamouring for attention. Theodor Adorno wrote of his teacher Alban Berg that ‘he successfully avoided becoming adult without remaining infantile,’ which could scarcely be said of Benjamin Britten, whose attempt to become adult had, incidentally, included at the age of 20 a plan ...”

“... most pleasure to the historian of highbrow gossip. Both Lenya and Weill can be quite outspoken. Theodor Wiesengrund (later Adorno) is ‘a pale flaming asshole’ (‘blasses flammendes Arschloch’). To Weill, Sternberg, the director of The Blue Angel, is a ‘megalo-maniacal schmuck’, the composer Hanns Eisler ‘that ...”

“... tried for here. Ambiguity, for reasons stated, seems too weak. The term I prefer is borrowed from Theodor Adorno. ‘Non-identity’: this is Delacroix’s theme. That is to say, the patterns and anti-patterns of line and colour he spent his life contriving were not meant, as I see it, simply to blur and evaporate the given identities of things – not ...”

“... me.’ Death was a problem too. In July 1948, after his son Klaus attempted suicide, Mann wrote to Theodor Adorno: ‘The situation remains dangerous. My two sisters committed suicide’ – Carla in 1910, Lula in 1927 – ‘and Klaus has much of the elder sister in him.’ Klaus finally killed himself in 1949, as did his brother Michael in 1977. It was ...”

“... thing, so different in tone and intent is Rose from the other two. Take as an instance Matthias Theodor Vogt’s brilliantly original essay ‘Taking the Waters at Bayreuth’ in the Millington/Spencer collection. Vogt’s ingenious point is that Wagner was obsessed with hydropathy, and that for him hydrotherapy, or a water cure, was as necessary for human ...”

“... Stern was working on his Habilitationschrift in Frankfurt, though his progress was blocked by Theodor Adorno. (This was one reason for Arendt’s lifelong loathing of ‘Teddy’, another being his use of his mother’s Italian and non-Jewish surname instead of his father’s, which was Wiesengrund. ‘Infamy’, in Arendt’s view: an ...”

“... wanted to forget – thought they had an explanation for the disaster: prejudice and personality. Theodor Adorno and his colleagues observed that ‘in a culture of law, order and reason there . . . have survived the irrational remnants of ancient racial and religious hatreds.’ Their analysis of these diseased survivors was in the tradition of ...”