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“... Hofmannsthal’s is a reputation in abeyance, and I am content that it should be so. There is a limit to how far it can fall – though in the English Sprachraum it was perhaps never all that high in the first place – because of ‘The Lord Chandos Letter’, the tiny but freakishly important story of 1902, the wonderful-but-never-seen play, Der Schwierige, a swansong of passivity in the drawing-room; and, above all, the opera libretti he wrote for Richard Strauss: Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, Die Frau ohne Schatten and Arabella ...”

“... Although W.H. Auden, who ranks with Hugo vonHofmannsthal among the master librettists of the age, thought that the meaning of libretto’s words were its least important component (at any rate, so far as the audience is concerned), and that a libretto is ‘really a private letter to the composer’, he also found that ‘as an art-form involving words, opera is the last refuge of the High Style ...”

“... or LSE of this period be considered provincial, however tenuous their grasp of Karl Kraus or Hugo vonHofmannsthal. What is true is that the capitals of the life of the mind were permanently transferred, to London, New York, Chicago and – whether we like it or not – Los Alamos. The intellectual successor ...”

“... men who provided logistical support for the assassination, a 19-year-old bank clerk called Ernst von Salomon, wrote a bestselling novel glorifying the Freikorps and Organisation Consul after his release from prison in 1930: entitled Die Geächteten (‘the ostracised’, published in English translation shortly afterwards as The Outlaws), it was an ...”

“... seductions and vast readership. Even among writers, there may be odd moments of honesty. Hugo vonHofmannsthal, who for the best part of 30 years shared a publisher with Zweig, Anton Kippenberg, founder of the Insel Verlag, wrote to dispraise him; when Kippenberg, foolishly trying to change ...”

“... and Paris. The general effect, however invidious comparisons may be, is of a mixture of Browning, Hugo VonHofmannsthal and Robert Lowell, with something of Whitman’s breezy effect of easing himself in poetry’s words. If that sounds bizarre – well, she is in many ways a bizarre writer. Her ways with rhythm and ...”

“... which, exceptionally, was published under the Nazis. Adorno used his analysis of the Stefan George-Hugo vonHofmannsthal correspondence to analyse the most significant aestheticist currents in the Weimar period. Unsurprisingly, in the present collection, it is often a question of the letter itself, but now as a form in ...”

“... the connection with Reinhardt’s theatre; my intimate relation with the Nietzsche Archive, to Hofmannsthal, to van de Velde, my close association with Dehmel, Liliencron, Klinger, Lieberman, Ansorge, Gerhart Hauptmann, along with the two most influential journals, Zukunft and Neue Rundschau. And in a completely different sphere to Berlin Society, the ...”