Search Results

“... became, Guðmundsson writes, ‘the first Icelandic celebrity’ – a Großschriftsteller like Thomas Mann, someone who ‘was becoming a kind of cultural president of the nation’, and whose travels ‘had started to take on the air of state visits’. For a couple of years, it seemed to be his life’s work to avoid accepting an invitation to ...”

“... to discussion of the revolution.Further west, in Princeton, or much further, in Pacific Palisades, Thomas Mann and his family spent diverting evenings – this in 1939 – debating which of Zweig, Ludwig, Feuchtwanger and Remarque was the worst writer. Emil Ludwig himself, in an obituary, wrote that none of Zweig’s writings had affected him in a way ...”

“... When Murray Gell-Mann proposed the existence of a kind of sub-atomic particle in 1964, he came up with the name ‘quark’ after a phrase in Finnegans Wake: ‘Three Quarks for Muster Mark!’ A new kind of genetically modified flax resistant to herbicides has been developed in Canada and christened ‘triffid’, allegedly in honour of a nebula – Alan McHughen, the scientist responsible, may be a mild-mannered biologist by day, but at night he’s an amateur astronomer ...”

“... the Yiddish journal Literarishe bleter. He was also reading Schopenhauer and Hamsun, translating Thomas Mann and The Possessed. ‘I couldn’t be the sort of Jew my pious parents wanted to make of me,’ Singer later declared. ‘I couldn’t, and didn’t want to be, a non-Jew. I could live neither with, nor without, God. I aspired to the big, free ...”

“... ones were more likely to welcome it, whether as a long-desired reunion of ‘might and mind’ (Thomas Mann) or quite simply, as for Rilke, ‘a god at last’. And Guillaume Apollinaire spoke for all in announcing that, on 31 August 1914, everything had changed: Nations were rushing together to know each other through and through The dead were ...”

“... extravagance is appropriate to the extravagance of the myth. Parallels with some of Heinrich Mann’s black comedies, with the use of fable and grotesquerie in The Tin Drum, perhaps with Marquez, come to mind. Syberberg uses Brechtian techniques of alienation (placards, back-projection, narrative monologue) to achieve the same distancing effect. But he ...”

“... subtitled ‘A Short History of Anglo-Irish Literature from S.T. Coleridge to Thomas Mann’) – McCormack’s contribution to Across a Roaring Hill, a collection of essays on ‘the Protestant imagination in modern Ireland’. In both these undertakings, the short and the long one, McCormack shows a salutary urge to acknowledge all ...”

“... Cosmos: 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 ...”

“... there 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 ...”

“... of the 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 ...”

“... in the mighty lineage of European literary realism from Balzac and Scott to Tolstoy and Thomas Mann. It was in Waverley and Le Rouge et le noir, not in the World Spirit or the workers’ republic, that individual particular and organic whole, sense and reason, the actual and the ideal, could be reconciled. Indeed, realism was simply a name for ...”

“... to sacrifice an iota of civility on that account, is as keenly conscious of the coupling as Thomas Mann or Virginia Woolf. ‘When he walked out of the refuge of his study,’ his secretary Theodora Bosanquet, who crops up as a character in this novel, remarked, ‘he saw a place of torment, where creatures of prey perpetually thrust their claws ...”

“... moves 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 ...”

“... severity. 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 ...”

“... to the humiliation and murder of dogs. Consider, for instance, the degrees of shame disclosed by Thomas Mann’s relationship with dogs. ‘Excruciating shame can lead to its denial through displacement on the abject dog,’ Kuzniar writes, a thesis perfectly illustrated in Mann’s ‘Tobias Mindernickel’, in which ...”