“... 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 ...”

“... a pantomime dragon and Siegfried squeezed Brynhilde’s breasts while warbling ‘Das ist kein Mann.’ Yet his outrage at Wagner’s irreverence was overblown (after all, he named the topiary dragon in his Kelmscott garden Fafnir). Wagner and Morris both cast their Volsung heroes as slayers of a sick bourgeoisie. Sigurd is the ‘Wild-thing ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... alcohol and morphine. But the persona he created still drives sales sixty years after his death. Michael Hofmann’s 2009 translation of his last novel, Alone in Berlin, sold around 350,000 copies in the UK alone, 100,000 of them in the first three months after publication. Much of Alone in Berlin’s success has to do with the way the story is told. Otto ...”

“... Cork, Daniel Corkery’s place, was probably slow to receive the good news from Eliot, Pound, Mann, Kafka. Valéry and Joyce. Yeats was inescapable, but there was nothing in Yeats to discourage a young writer from preferring ‘hue’ to ‘colour’. O’Faolain, living among words, chose for company the words he thought were already poetry. Looking back ...”

“... until later) the novel begins as explosively as Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, where Michael Henchard puts his wife up for sale. Eilis understands where the man is coming from, as if his belligerence were a tribal norm: ‘She had known men like this in Ireland. Should one of them discover that their wife had been unfaithful and was pregnant as a ...”

“... Urania, an educational association that hosted popular talks by the likes of Einstein and Thomas Mann; Josef follows a similar track. Adler was pressed into slave labour to help lay a railway line between Prague and Brno, then he was sent to Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and two subcamps of Buchenwald, Niederorschel and Langenstein. He puts Josef through all of ...”

“... with a scathing reference to the Oscar-winning director of Marty: ‘A director like Delbert Mann probably doesn’t think this way. He follows a pattern. Shot – the character speaks; reverse angle, someone answers.’ Whatever he did, Godard avoided following a pattern, whether in the story construction or the editing or the choice of genre or the ...”

“... of the book, all layers of imperial society have been included in the tale; its gifted translator, Michael Hofmann (who has done more than any other living translator to bring us Joseph Roth in English), nicely calls it ‘a fairy story that has swallowed a novel’. The fable begins with an official visit to Vienna, sometime in the late 19th century, by the ...”

“... may be yet. The closest parallels to Aids in epidemiological terms are syphilis and Hepatitis B. Michael Adler, in Aids and the Epidemics of History, lists the sudden appearance of syphilis (at the end of the 15th century), its asymptomatic carrier state and predominantly sexual means of transmission as the chief points of similarity. Hepatitis B, as Baruch ...”

“... Gide who turned critical of the Soviet Union, bitterly disappointing their hosts, were excoriated.Michael David-Fox’s Showcasing the Great Experiment is the story of Soviet wooing of the Western intelligentsia, focusing on VOKS under Kameneva and Arosev. About a hundred thousand foreigners visited the Soviet Union in the prewar period, many of them ...”

“... to historical romance. Much of Pamuk’s fiction reads like a homage to his Western models: Mann, Faulkner, Borges, Joyce, Dostoevsky, Proust and – in The Museum of Innocence, the tale of a doomed, obsessional love affair between a man in his thirties and an 18-year-old shop girl – Nabokov. Indeed, his affection for the European tradition is as ...”

“... on, but then skirts. The historical novel – if we except its one great precursor, Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas – is a product of romantic nationalism. This is as true of Tolstoy as it is of Scott, Cooper, Manzoni, Galdós, Jókai, Sienkiewicz or so many others. The original matrix of this nationalism was the European reaction against Napoleonic ...”

“... friend Ben Gurion: ‘The Germans have summed up their own experience in the bitter phrase “Mann kann sich totseigen!” — you can triumph yourself to death. This is what the Israelis have been doing. They have bitten off much more than they can swallow.’ Five hundred courageous Israelis have sent a letter to Western embassies calling for sanctions ...”