“... in an interview at the bank was to display knowledge of the great European authors, especially Thomas Mann. (The other requirement was to submit a sample of handwriting for analysis by Warburg’s intimate friend, the graphologist Theodora Dreifuss. Ferguson is understandably sceptical about this unusual interest of Warburg’s but is partially ...”

“... the steamier publishers’ lists grow. In contrast to the populous public realms of Balzac and Thomas Mann, not to speak of the postcolonial novel, a large swathe of fiction has become privatised and parochial, more suburban than cosmopolitan (though The Green Road ranges from Munster to New York, Mali to Toronto). Novels are more likely to be about ...”

“... the ones which earn Fontane the distinction of being the ‘greatest German novelist before Thomas Mann’. Again this seems an overstatement – what about Goethe? – and it’s puzzling that Craig should devote so little space to books he holds in such high esteem. Although Craig’s study is amply footnoted, it lacks a bibliography, and dates ...”

“... German science has never recovered. Individuals such as Arnold Schoenberg, Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann, along with cultural institutions like the Frankfurt School and the Bauhaus, benefited the countries to which they fled, leaving Germany a cultural desert. For Blackbourn​ , the origins of Nazism can be located not in the long run of German ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... before and turned down an opportunity to meet General Ludendorff. Others were also worried: Thomas Mann noted that while ‘Wagner will never cease to interest me . . . Bayreuth as it now presents itself interests me not at all.’ Hamann reports every passion, tiff and row, every argument that took place over the hiring and firing of the great ...”

“... is the most ‘European’ of Roth’s novels, and the tone of this passage will strike readers of Thomas Mann or Franz Kafka as familiar, perhaps even jadedly so. Yet the intensity of the commitment to Keatsian negative capability is remarkable in a writer so insistently loyal to the American novel’s covenant with quotidian, lived life. It is no small ...”

“... thing, and to Lawrence, such sickness represents the fatal flaw of the modern novel. He described Mann as ‘the last sick sufferer from the complaint of Flaubert. The latter stood away from life as from a leprosy. And Thomas Mann, like Flaubert, feels vaguely that he has in him something finer than ever physical life ...”

“... be cleaner, more self-referential, more knowing or more minxy. In relation to Hollywood, Thomas Mann (from his perch at Pacific Palisades) had pronounced Isherwood ‘starry-eyed’, but Isherwood had learned more than Mann about gay sexual deportment. Carrying the Weimar spirit with him, writing with ...”

“... shadow to the devil for magical gifts quickly squandered and so lost his ‘human belonging’, as Thomas Mann put it. Here the Latin adage nomen omen has an ironic twist, for Chamisso thought Schlemihl meant ‘beloved of God’. Variations on the theme abound – his shadow turns up in a Hawthorne story, and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s character Erasmus Spikher ...”

“... addictive pleasure (for some) of reading The Man without Qualities. It’s rather like reading Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon. After worrying quite a bit about plot and meaning and when things are going to get moving, you let go and just hang out with the characters, inhabit their world and their arguments and their idiocies pretty much as they do. You ...”

“... by ‘the (Aldous) Huxleys’. She chauffeured a large black poodle across America for the (Thomas) Manns; she drank cocktails in Paris with Jane Bowles and Martha Gellhorn; in Grasse and California she cooked and ate with M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child. And when she settled in England in the 1960s, Elizabeth David told her that the bit in her first ...”

“... leaders and intellectuals, including Stalin, Einstein, Henry Ford, Mussolini, Fritz Kreisler, Thomas Mann, John Dos Passos, H.L. Mencken, Anatole France, H.G. Wells, the dean of Harvard Law School, Roscoe Pound and 205 members of the law school’s 1927 graduating class. Interest in the case did not die with the men’s executions. It has been the ...”

“... which a Jewish refugee tells his life-story at a length suggestive of an unpublished novel by Thomas Mann (Amos,however, spares us its contents). All that and – surely this is the next-to-last straw – he has time to reread bits of his manuscript. But given the racy and pithy exuberance of Williams’s narrative and his crowded comic ...”