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“... The first thing to notice about The Spell is that it is a good, readable story. Hermann Broch is considered ‘very hard to read’, wrote Martin Seymour-Smith in his useful guide, Novels and Novelists. ‘He used most of the Modernist technical devices available to him, but mainly stream of consciousness.’ Broch’s work has often attracted comments like that and they sound, to the general reader, like the kiss of death ...”

“... art but hardly ends there). Kitsch has attracted – that is to say, repelled – novelists from Hermann Broch to Milan Kundera and critics from Clement Greenberg to Saul Friedländer, all of whom took it up at periods when technologies of mass culture and mass politics were intensifying: Broch and Greenberg after the ...”

“... clan’ would have been a better translation – included Alma Mahler, the novelist Hermann Broch, whose essay, Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit, is the best short evocation of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna there is, and his mistress, the wife of the art-historian Meier-Graefe. There was a host of minor literary and artistic figures of the Weimar ...”

“... of three great swanky Bollingen-financed volumes – with prefaces by Eliot and introductions by Hermann Broch – that constitute Hofmannsthal’s apogee, and demonstrate how far he has declined since. I have to say, on the basis of my rereading of these and other works of Hofmannsthal’s (I don’t do opera), and a shocked and then greedy reading of ...”

“... which must be philosophical in some sense, but won’t call itself that. Kundera attributes to Hermann Broch ‘a new art of the specifically novelistic essay ... hypothetical, playful or ironic’ (Kundera’s italics). Tone is very important in this context – Kundera calls his own tone playful and ironic, like ...”

“... the First World War, and many intellectuals grew anxious about the cultural effects of kitsch; Hermann Broch went so far as to declare it ‘the evil in the value-system of art’. Schwitters took a different approach – he exploited banalities. ‘The best way to battle the bad taste of formless and mindless literature is i-banality,’ he ...”

“... and even in German, are read in excerpted sentences and paragraphs: in aphorism. The works of Hermann Broch, Musil, Schnitzler and Zweig are intact because their preoccupation with Vienna was merely prologue, material for extrapolation. Kraus was too honest, or too impatient, to try his hand at fiction, and instead got directly at the facts and his ...”

“... allegory, the force of repetition: Adler may have been introduced to these techniques by Kafka, Hermann Broch, Robert Musil or Alfred Döblin, but he mastered them by studying Goebbels and Eichmann and his clerks, whom Adorno called Schreibtischmörder, ‘desk-murderers’. The Nazi bureaucrats were responsible for two of the most malevolent ...”

“... Auto-da-Fé is a book about life ‘lived in the head’ – it was Canetti’s friend, Hermann Broch, who saved him from the vulgarity of calling its hero ‘Kant’ – and abstraction is certainly not its dominant mode. But the book does pose the question by what margin it succumbs to the dangers it describes. In the morning paper of 15 July ...”

“... century – where ‘novels’ is too restrictive a term – can omit either Joyce’s Ulysses or Broch’s Death of Virgil, the one immersed in Homer, the other in the Georgics, Eclogues and Aeneid. If the turn of spirit in, say, Robert Graves and Saint-Jean Perse is radically Homeric, that in T.S. Eliot and Valéry is unmistakably Virgilian. The equations ...”

“... love with Strindberg’s daughter Kerstin and the conductor Bruno Walter, Elisabeth flirting with Hermann Broch, Michael befriending the son of Hermann Hesse. The divisions within Germany during the First World War were reflected in the disagreements between Thomas and Heinrich. Thomas, Katia wrote, ‘for a time ...”

“... Blackmur, Allen Tate, the European émigrés at the Institute for Advanced Study – Thomas Mann, Hermann Broch, Erich Kahler, Erwin Panofsky, the mathematicians Hermann Weyl and John von Neumann, the physicists Albert Einstein and Wolfgang Pauli – and there were frequent visits from distinguished speakers such as ...”

“... the Modernist attracted to kitsch, whose writings she can use to construct a defence against Hermann Broch, Gillo Dorfles and Clement Greenberg, who abhorred it as the enemy of true modernity. The distinction she makes, extrapolating from Benjamin, between nostalgic and melancholic kitsch, enables her to defend at least the melancholic segment of ...”

“... him in my esteem.’ The greatly admired Musil comes off little better, and even the revered Broch is found wanting. When Canetti drops names, they suffer bruising. But this isn’t to deny that Canetti’s novel, Auto da Fe, which Stern doesn’t appear to admire much, has its icy riches, its knife-edged images of what impresses as painful truth, a part ...”