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“... Sacrilege sanctifies.’ Under this heading Brecht cheerfully sums up what happens to plays, like Shakespeare’s, that outlast their own time – and what may now be happening to his own: What keeps the classical plays alive is the use made of them, even if it’s misuse. In the schoolroom morals are squeezed out of them: in the theatre they provide the vehicles for self-seeking actors, ambitious Lord Chamberlains and profiteers out to make money from evening entertainments ...”

“... Bert Brecht, the Communist poet and playwright, has become a cultural monument. Is it then not time, he might ask, to consider blowing him up? One of the problems is this kind of tough talk. A certain recklessness of language, a down-to-earth bluntness, has been widely received as his most valuable legacy. It is what makes him, some say, an essentially popular writer ...”

“... In​ his Svendborg Poems, written in exile in Denmark in the 1930s, Brecht wrote: ‘In the dark times/Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing/About the dark times.’ His life was shaped by these dark times. He came of age during the First World War, became a successful writer in the years before Hitler’s rise to power, spent 16 years as an émigré, and returned to Berlin only to clash with the East German apparatchiks ...”

“... The major contribution of the English theatre to last year’s Brecht centenary was Lee Hall’s dazzling version of Mr Puntila and His Man Matti, presented by the Right Size, a touring company led by the comic actors Sean Foley and Hamish McColl. Their prologue goes some way to explaining why the Anglophone response to the Brechtfest was so muted ...”

“... rare is the expression ‘I don’t know,’ and to admit that arguing with (say) John Wesley, or Bertolt Brecht, or even – to be banal – Roger Scruton, would be a pretty grim business. Part of the reason for closure, or for manic pedagogy, must be political, in the widest sense of the word. Having launched a social campaign, or founded a project ...”

“... time – or perhaps history – was fluid, burgeoning, open-ended. For a Modernist writer like Bertolt Brecht change in itself is a good, just as for Samuel Johnson change was in itself an evil. Bad things were reified products; good things were dynamically evolving processes. This piece of Romantic banality never went entirely unchallenged. If Pascal ...”

“... I have never read a life like John Fuegi’s of Brecht. Revisionism doesn’t begin to describe it. This is dartboard stuff, effigy abuse, voodoo biography. If Fuegi could get inside the Dorotheenfriedhof, uproot Brecht’s jagged scalene headstone, dig through six feet of Brandenburg sand and a zinc coffin, and do something to the remains involving chicken heads, inverted crosses and black candles, I don’t doubt that he would ...”

“... its bravura. It is a declaration of independence from a common form of unfreedom, what a song by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill calls ‘sexual bondage’. So, when we think of Dietrich’s films, innocence is not the first word that comes to mind. But there is something unmarked about her persona, as if the ironic wisdom her characters often express ...”

“... who had been a fellow student at Oxford. In 1933 he financed the final collaboration between Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. When Salvador Dalí was nearly suffocated by the diving suit he wore to the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936, it was James who prised it off with a billiard cue. The back of his head features twice – once ...”

“... is sitting not only In your theatre, but also In the world. ‘I live​ in dark times,’ Brecht said, but he liked to believe the darkness would end. In the poem containing those words, written in the 1930s, he apologises to ‘those born after’, saying that Hatred, even of meanness Makes you ugly. Anger, even at injustice Makes your voice ...”

“... Bertolt Brecht​ was known to say that the best argument against his plays were his poems. A similar thing might be said about the diaries and novels of the East German writer Brigitte Reimann, born in 1933. Siblings (1963), given a fluent but flawed translation by Lucy Jones, is the first of her novels to be published in English, after the two volumes of her diaries that survived: I Have No Regrets: Diaries, 1955-63 (also translated by Jones), and It All Tastes of Farewell: Diaries, 1964-70, translated by Steph Morris ...”

“... for work, Aufricht laughed and said, ‘You look like a tadpole,’ before sending him off to Bertolt Brecht to ask for the part of the village idiot. Brecht admired Lorre’s tadpoleish looks and he was soon directing him in major roles. He starred, for example, in Mann ist Mann at the same time as he was filming ...”

“... signing his works ‘Rockwell Grosz’ in his attempt to transform himself into a suburban squire. Bertolt Brecht had tried to lure him back to Berlin to no avail. ‘We have flowerbeds and cut the lawn ourselves with a mower,’ Grosz fired back. ‘A Winchester shotgun hangs over the fireplace, and anyone who gets too close takes one in the ...”

“... With the deaths of Thomas Mann in 1955 and of Bertolt Brecht and Gottfried Benn in 1956, a major era in the history of German literature comes to an end. These three are not only the greatest writers of their age, they are also its witnesses. Each of them worked in a different genre: Thomas Mann in the convoluted, partly essayistic prose of his novels, Bert Brecht in the drama and narrative poetry of social dialectics, Benn in the lyrical poetry of radical Modernism ...”

“... the urban masses of Paris, even though those masses are nowhere actually present in his work. Bertolt Brecht thought that realism was a matter of a work’s effects, not of whether it recalled something familiar. According to this theory, realism is a relationship between the artwork and its audience, in which case your play can be realistic on ...”