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“... her of being out of touch with reality, her litigious skill far surpasses his. On the back flap of Michael Hofmann’s new edition, My First Wife is pitched as ‘a lightly fictionalised account of Wassermann’s own troubled marriage’. In 1898, Wassermann, a German Jew with a difficult childhood behind him (his father was a failed businessman who could ...”

“... as distinct from novels, where heroes and others just have thoughts. When Musil says that Thomas Mann and others ‘write for people who are there’, while he himself writes ‘for people who aren’t there’, he is being witty and mean and feeling a little sorry for himself. But it is a condition of the invention of a new form that the people aren’t ...”

“... no vacancy’. Ingrid Bergman’s presence ‘was like breakfast on a sunny morning’; Thomas Mann ‘would be magnificent at his own trial’. ‘I suppose everyone who meets Garbo dreams of saving her – either from herself, or from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayor, or from some friend or lover. And she always eludes them by going into an act. This is what has made ...”

“... don’t seem to be many modern writers who care about the book, or have been marked by it. Thomas Mann wrote a wonderful essay about it, but its moral world seems very far from his own. Faulkner said he used to read Don Quixote once a year, but you wouldn’t guess this from his writing. The influence of Don Quixote on Latin American fiction has been ...”

“... Before 1911 his contributors included Masaryk, Strindberg, Wedekind, Wilde, Trakl and Heinrich Mann. The journal was meant, Kraus said, to speak to an empire on which the sun never rises. He also published seven volumes of essays, two other volumes of aphorisms, and nine volumes of verse, as well as The Last Days of Mankind, a vast satirical ...”

“... rather than others will do for him. It is something like The Genesis of a Novel, a diary Thomas Mann wrote about the composition of Dr Faustus, except that it isn’t a diary, and James talks to himself about nothing but the book. He wonders where he will send his characters after Newport. New York, definitely. And then? Maybe California? ‘I even ask ...”

“... Eliot, for all his Anglo-Catholicism, is a perfect Calvinist in this sense, and so is Thomas Mann, and even more so his desperately disciplined writer-hero in Death in Venice, who dies of the mere proximity of the extravagances he has denied himself. Joyce, on the other hand, is no Calvinist at all, and neither is Hopkins (Davie’s own ...”

“... as far out as this. De Man in America was something else, a character out of Melville or Thomas Mann, suave, charming, unreliable, resilient, always walking on some kind of moral and financial tightrope. He claimed that his well-known uncle, Hendrik de Man, a socialist who became a National Socialist, was his father, and he invented several publications ...”

“... witnessed. Formidably intelligent people describe Tristan in terms of a conversion experience. Michael Tanner speaks of its ‘qualifications for religious status’; while for Roger Scruton, Tristan und Isolde offers nothing less than ‘a sacrificial consolation for the imperfect loves of those who witness it’.In the early days, the expressionistic ...”

“... a ‘strong’ or ‘powerful’ state depends of course on how we understand these terms. Here Michael Mann’s distinction between ‘despotic’ and ‘infrastructural’ power is helpful, the former denoting an arbitrary power over civil society, the latter the power of state institutions to co-ordinate and regulate social life by working through ...”

“... is at pains to clear away suspicions unjustly entertained – for instance, in the cases of Basil Mann, Guy Liddell and Tomas Harris. There is a spirit of justice in Pincher, which comes out too in his treatment of Blunt, Burgess, Driberg, and a civil servant called John Cairncross. All these geese become swans in Pincher’s skilled hands. How unfair to ...”

“... population was in full swing. As the leading comparative authority on modern ethnic cleansing, Michael Mann, writes, ‘the escalation from the first incidents to genocide occurred within three months, a much more rapid escalation than Hitler’s later attack on the Jews.’ Sakir – probably more than any other conspirator, the original designer of ...”

“... point of comparison, never made, so far as I know, would be Stevens’s near contemporary Thomas Mann, born in 1875, never a banker but almost aggressively aware of the duties of the author as bourgeois and family man. Experimentation – inasmuch as either man actually ‘experimented’ – happened on the page. Both began as humorists or caricaturists and ...”

“... son. The debts accumulated by addiction and embezzlement threaten mother, wife and children. When Mann delimited the feeble cobweb spirit of Hanno Buddenbrook, he was striking up as artist against the artistic spirit and its frailty, and praising good North German Protestant drawers of bills of lading. Updike here suggests a general rottenness, a going to the ...”

“... bearing titles like ‘Who is B. Traven?’, ‘The Great Traven Mystery’, and ‘Wer ist der Mann, der Traven heist?’ Traven has been identified with a surprising variety of known figures, including one President of Mexico, Adolfo Lopez Mateos, who felt obliged to issue a public disclaimer. Traven has been described, variously, as ...”