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“... like the motions of an amputated limb. Or at least that Bolivar can’t renounce power, that as Thomas Mann says in a similar context, we can’t live morally or spiritually from not wanting. We would have to want something else, like Bolivar’s friend and favourite Antonio Jose de Sucre, who prefers his family to the lures of high office. Not that ...”

“... are undiscriminatingly idolatrous of all literary forbears: Kafka, Gogol, James, Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, Chekhov etc. There is something very American in this comprehensive deference to literary celebrity. It’s true that all these writers deserve great respect, but a bit too good to be true that nobody, in Roth’s world, is ill-judging enough to ...”

“... Street crash, witnesses the rise of Nazism in Berlin (where he attends parties with Fritz Lang and Thomas Mann), and arrives in Hollywood just in time to fall foul of McCarthyism. Any Human Heart (2002) is narrated by Logan Mountstuart, an English author who knocks about Oxford and London with the likes of Cyril Connolly and Henry Green, reports on the ...”

“... as the uninvolved observer of the Winshaws only to uncover his complicity in his own narrative: Thomas Winshaw’s swindling schemes helped ruin his father, who was then killed off by the junk food from Dorothy Winshaw’s torture chamber of a farm; and Henry Winshaw helped the death of his sick girlfriend by playing a central part in running down the ...”

“... is an act of love, the novel itself is an expression of hatred – German self-hatred, which, Thomas Mann said, ‘goes to the point of self-disgust and self-abomination.’ The blurb tells us that the four chief characters in the novel represent the four elements of the German soul : ‘music, bureaucracy, arms and religion’. The story is set in ...”

“... on Titus Andronicus, Goethe and Idomeneo, before reaching Modernism with Stravinsky, Eliot, Mann, Lawrence and Schoenberg, mentioning Adorno and Horkheimer only to remark that their ‘assumptions about the origins of sacrifice are now mere curiosities’. Along the way he discusses many forgotten operas and plays, working with great piles of literature ...”

“... train – ‘to meet all his pals. The Frankfurt school. Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse and Thomas Mann.’ Although Adorno helped Mann with Doctor Faustus, Mann had no especial proximity to the Frankfurt School, so Stone is technically wrong. But the little list is wrong ...”

“... was born in 1917, awarded the Nobel Prize in 1972 (the first German writer thus honoured since Thomas Mann in 1929 – Hermann Hesse having adopted Swiss citizenship, and Nelly Sachs Swedish) and died in 1985. He was an early instance, an avatar, of the writer as right thinker, as influencer, like Rushdie, like Solzhenitsyn, like Pasolini: his was the ...”

“... to the Left, he remained strikingly aloof from politics – compare his account with that of Golo Mann, another Heidelberg contemporary, who was more of an aesthete but also much more engaged politically. In 1930, Elias moved to the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, the ‘Marxburg’ His account of his three years there is austere. There is no mention ...”

“... Camus and Sartre. Walser, drawn to balloon rides and flights of fancy, pretended to no such heft; Thomas Mann referred to him as a ‘clever child’. When Sontag situated Walser as ‘the missing link between Kleist and Kafka’, however, she was gesturing towards an outlaw tradition running alongside, and frequently in resistance to, the ...”

“... by a backlist of Seeker foreign authors including Mishima, Moravia, Svevo, Gide, Colette, Kafka, Thomas Mann, Grass, Böll and half a dozen others, found that the whole lot added up to half Orwell’s earnings in the same period. New editions of four books have just been published, said to be ‘authoritative texts’ although in some the variants from ...”

“... or to The Archers. The self-awareness of the novel in regard to its public is curiously subtle. Thomas Mann and Arnold Bennett would have taken it for granted, like Scott, that though their reconstructions might not appeal to everyone, they would be read by a complete cross-section of the reading public, from the discerning connoisseur to those who ...”

“... said some colleagues wouldn’t join events with the word ‘refugee’ in the programme: ‘Thomas Mann was a refugee, but we don’t remember him as a “refugee writer”. The classification is problematic.’ Two novels published in English last year reject the paradigm. The Lebanese author Hoda Barakat’s Voices of the Lost came to attention ...”

“... fiction-writers: for Alain-Fournier in Le Grand Meaulnes, for Alec Waugh in The Loom of Youth, for Thomas Mann in ‘Tonio Kröger’. Szerb’s group centres on a charismatic brother and sister, Tamás and Eva Ulpius, who live in unstructured bohemian chaos with their father, a grumpy archaeologist. The others – Ervin, a brilliant, sensitive, gentle ...”

“... the little town was all but overwhelmed by distinguished German refugees, Brecht, Alma Mahler, Thomas Mann and his family among them. This now famous episode, which turned a French fishing village briefly into the ‘capital of German literature’, is recorded by a thick smattering of blue plaques. At the time, feelings were more mixed. Bedford ...”