“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... or not with the exclusion of common factuality. The two are not necessarily related. Consider Thomas Love Peacock. There the ordinary stuff of life is swept away to make room for abstract speculation. That, and just that, is the joke. It tickles our funny-bone to meet the denizens of Nightmare Abbey – young Scythrop, the heir of the house, and ...”

“... labour, a way of life’. Her artless title is taken from a letter Helen Lowe-Porter wrote to Thomas Mann after she became his English translator. She was, she said later, an ‘unknown instrument … which … must … serve him to change the garment of his art into a better one which might clothe her for the marketplace until times ...”

“... and sometimes, in the 20th, that Continental essayistic tradition which permits a writer like Thomas Mann or Jacques Rivière to produce a kind of fattened philosophy. During the Fifties, Murdoch exchanged her Existentialism for a loosely Christian Platonism, which has been the fabric of her worldview ever since. (Her Gifford Lectures, published as ...”

“... nothing as far out as this. De Man in America was something else, a character out of Melville or Thomas Mann, suave, charming, unreliable, resilient, always walking on some kind of moral and financial tightrope. He claimed that his well-known uncle, Hendrik de Man, a socialist who became a National Socialist, was his father, and he invented several ...”

“... to the full her talents as a close reader of word and image: one on the novel of ideas from Thomas Mann to J.M. Coetzee and Nicola Barker; the other on the creepily insouciant photographs of Torbjørn Rødland. In both cases, the gimmick’s compromised form seems like the only way to accommodate ‘“ideas” imported from criticism or ...”

“... music dramas staged. This is clearly what moved and impressed exceptional Wagnerians like Proust, Thomas Mann and Mallarmé. It is precisely Wagner’s extremely varied legacy – a legacy which includes Toscanini, Boulez, Schoenberg, and critical critics like Deathridge, Nattiez and Adorno – that Paul Rose’s book attempts to refute. Not that his ...”

“... Then there’s Doctor Reichhardt, the artist imprisoned for his ideals, but he is more of a Thomas Mann-style grand bourgeois. Perhaps the multiple self-portraits make sense: there’s always more than one Hans Fallada. In Fallada’s 1942 memoir, Damals bei uns daheim (Our Home in Days Gone By), he describes himself as a Pechvogel, an unlucky ...”

“... was lent a copy of Buddenbrooks, Johannes ordered him to give it back at once: he considered Thomas Mann a traitor to the republic. It’s not surprising that under these family and political pressures, Fest went into a ‘difficult’ phase of rudeness and defiance that culminated with his carving a cartoon face of Hitler on the lid of his school ...”

“... to win a living by his pen. He was a fine translator as well as writer, and brought some works of Thomas Mann and Franz Werfel into English. Only a paltry nickel-and-dime dispute lost him the commission to complete Scott-Moncrieff’s version of A la recherche du temps perdu. (As you reel from this thought, reflect that instead he attained immortality by ...”

“... is like reading occasional passages from a Modernist masterpiece: like reading a cut-up of Thomas Mann or a disarranged Robert Musil. In Nijinsky’s darkest hour we can see the outline of a very slow, modern-seeming death: he doodles the Great War in four volumes. In the end there is only a build-up of losses in his otherwise sparse room – loss ...”

“... that particular stable. At its most philistine and provincial, it makes Dick Cheney sound like Thomas Mann. The secular Ten Commandments that Dawkins commends to us, one of which advises us to enjoy our sex lives so long as they don’t damage others, are for the most part liberal platitudes. Dawkins quite rightly detests fundamentalists; but as far ...”

“... order had been restored. Nemesis had followed hubris; crime had received its just punishment. Thomas Mann said it, too: everything must be paid for. Expressions of self-pity were rare. Even before 1945, there were rumblings of guilt. ‘Ja, wir tragen unser Leiden mit Geduld, an der ganzen Scheisse sind wir selber schuld,’ people sang under their ...”