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“... supplies a personal memoir, while John Spurling discusses Farrell’s relations with Stendhal, Thomas Mann, Richard Hughes and Malcolm Lowry, and, by reproducing Farrell’s notes, indicates the general course the story was to have taken. Margaret Drabble writes on the comic undercutting, at their most solemn moments, of Farrell’s characters and ...”

“... butterflies most obviously. They’ve appeared in his writing before, notably in a line from Thomas Mann that serves as an epigraph to ‘The Architect’: ‘There is only one problem in the world: How does one break through the chrysalis and become a butterfly?’ The line glosses the story’s subject matter – Emil’s musical metamorphosis ...”

“... and published a number of officially approved books. Thiess was responding to a broadcast by Thomas Mann (who spent the period in exile in America) in which he said that everyone who lived in Germany between 1933 and 1945 was dishonoured by the horrific photographs that appeared across the world after the concentration camps were liberated. On the ...”

“... the first, a series of brief, stunningly incisive discussions of intellectuals, from Julien Benda, Thomas Mann, Eliot and Woolf through Orwell, Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, Mulhern sketches the collective portrait of what he calls ‘Kulturkritik’. He is not blind to Kulturkritik’s virtues, but more interested in what’s wrong with it ...”

“... of the threat posed by ‘the man’ (unnamed 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 ...”

“... Doberman nudging a little at the leash: time for a walk, the ‘Herr und Hund’ moment that Thomas Mann writes of. Like my father in the earlier picture, this is a man deeply rooted and comfortable in his world. I now have a third photograph of my father’s father: more precisely, of his remains – he is on his funeral bier. Only his head is ...”

“... Allgemeine Zeitung and elsewhere. Christa Wolf surely knows what she is about, following Thomas Mann to Pacific Palisades fifty years later. Not that Wolf is completely without blame herself. It seems to me that she did three things wrong: she retained her allegiance to (an idea of) East Germany when it was too late for that; she pulled out of ...”

“... of Being. Finally, there are appreciations of friends, such as Bloch, Benjamin, Kracauer and Thomas Mann – appreciations often laced with criticism, which in the case of the ‘curious realist’ Kracauer proved so troubling that their friendship did not survive it. Throughout, Adorno’s adherence to the model of a non-totalised force-field ...”

“... there. An impressive death scene is also at the heart of Pat Barker’s The Century’s Daughter (Thomas Mann once bluntly asserted that ‘literature is death,’ and went on: ‘I shall never understand how one can be enslaved by it without hating it bitterly’). It is typical of A.N. Wilson’s insouciance that the death scene in his Love Unknown is ...”

“... 12a and talked about Switzerland (where he’d just been), and about James Joyce and Nabokov and Thomas Mann; about ‘The Broken Gong’, his unpublished book on Buddha’s use of language; about St John’s, his Oxford college; about Lewis, my sister’s cat; about the Quaker school in Kenya where I was born, and where he and my mother had been ...”

“... we have no reason to believe that the wheel has stopped turning. I quote from a letter written by Thomas Mann to an unidentified questioner in 1932, partly because Mann is a character as little Shelleyan as may be, and he is here employing a language so remote from grandiosity as to sound like a bureaucratic minute: I ...”

“... of paintings represented by the Beuckelaer, but there is good evidence to the contrary. William Thomas in the middle of the 16th century and Thomas Coryat at its close are quoted in support of the idea that the Venetians were ‘spare of living’. In Coryat’s words they kept ‘no honourable hospitality, nor gallant ...”

“... tomb. Besides Piranesi she discusses Cavafy, whose Greek poems she has translated into French, and Thomas Mann, whose manner of dealing with antiquity (as in Joseph and his Brethren) she perhaps assimilates to her own way of dealing with Hadrian’s world. Galey suggests as much. ‘Are you sure that there’s no “autosuggestion” in your ...”

“... modernists, not only Auden and Isherwood, Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, but Proust and Gide, Thomas Mann, Musil and Hesse. Trapped in the tortuous syntax of a patriarchal society, their texts enact a struggle for emotional expression which is all the more impressive for its ambiguity. Resistance is the matrix of desire, linguistic decorum the ...”

“... a little, maybe. But even if they were, that would be okay. I’ve just visited the house where Thomas Mann lived – it’s a little museum now in Zurich. I don’t think there’s a more autobiographical writer in the world. Buddenbrooks is a generational novel about his family. It’s more than that, of course, but it’s the history of his family ...”