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“... for a year or two; Borgeses (d. 1986) will surge once the editing and republishing are sorted out; James Merrills (d. 1995) should be sold now and rebought later; Becketts (d. 1989) look a little iffy (though would-be insider-dealers should keep an eye on that biographer chap in Reading). The only reliable way for a writer to avoid this post-mortem critical ...”

“... Marthe Robert is a well-known freelance among French Germanisten. She has written extensively on Freudian theory, on myth and Romanticism, and she collaborated with André Breton on a splendid volume of Lichtenberg’s aphorisms. She is deeply familiar with Kafka’s writings, having translated most of them into French: her knowledge of books on Kafka and the world he lived in is less impressive ...”

“... its own repressed cause. This sort of class sclerosis is brilliantly depicted in a chapter of James Stern’s The Hidden Damage. Arriving unannounced in London shortly after VE Day from the US, where he has spent the war, Stern rings his parents in the country. His mother fails to recognise his voice and when he ...”

“... I write something, anything, good, indifferent, or trashy, every day,’ he told his friend James Stern, ‘I feel ill.’ Spurred on by these complementary inducements – the need to make money and the need not to be sick – he wrote quantities of prose. It appeared, over the years, in an impressive range of journals, from Eliot’s Criterion ...”

“... synergistic donativum that Should knock all others into a cocked hat. With such wits to evoke the stern advance Of Kronos I don’t think I stand much chance Of adding anything in that respect. Monuments of unageing intellect Have doubtless flooded in, all calculated To leave you feeling slightly devastated At how your trim form must perforce disperse ...”

“... Kellers and Hellers.) In the company of a few other British Germanists and translators, J.P. Stern, who died in November of last year, did much to make these writers more accessible to us, thanks to his persuasion that literature, no matter how exalted, is not the preserve of scholars, and that what has wide implications should be known widely. And ...”

“... James Atlas’s The Great Pretender is a first novel. But Atlas has some prior fame as the author of a powerful biography of Delmore Schwartz, America’s poète maudit who died tragically unfulfilled in 1966, having lived out the truth of one of his best essays: ‘The Isolation of the Modern Poet’. The Great Pretender tells the story of a tyro versifier, who comes to artistic consciousness around 1966 in Chicago and who hilariously fails to attain any subsequent artistic fulfilment ...”

“... 180-metre long, obstacle and horror-filled space makes clear the tragedy of their error. Fritz Stern also begins with a room. In 1979, he returned to his hometown, Breslau, now Polish Wroclaw, for the first time since 1938. He wrote about this ‘homecoming’ for his children not long afterwards, and now uses that private account as a public introduction ...”

“... eyes twinkled in the classic Frenchman’s delight in talk of les femmes. I told him about Henry James dictating his last novels to a woman named Theodora (Gift of God) Bosanquet. He said he was very fond of Henry James. I’d just been rereading The Golden Bowl, and saw it suddenly as a Derridean cat’s cradle of ...”

“... Much prefers the latter, doesn’t know why. It’ll be Malvina. Two spellings, one face: black, stern, starkly attractive, with a long bony body, fierce and flexible on the playgrounds of the eighth grade. At 12, she, Malvina the dominant, and young Lucchesi had competed for valedictorian of their grammar school and finished in a dead heat. Of ...”

“... conflicts, which leave Mayer’s ‘interpretative construct’ in tatters, is mentioned. Harold James is a recent export to Princeton from Peterhouse, Cambridge, and has solid, old-fashioned fare to offer. His book is inspired by Society and Democracy in Germany but lacks Ralf Dahrendorf’s width and intellectual stamina; its strength derives, above ...”

“... His source material was a series of interviews Newman recorded with the screenwriter Stewart Stern between 1986 and 1991, along with ‘oral histories’ of Newman by his contemporaries. In her foreword, Newman’s daughter Melissa says he wanted to create ‘an offering to the offspring’ as well as to set the record straight after decades of tabloid ...”

“... to do with the real-life Peter Morrison MP but was inspired by boyhood memories of the real-life James Prior. The fictional ‘Peter Morrison MP’ reappears in Morning Star, the first volume of Raven’s new novel sequence, but now he seems nothing like James Prior MP. We are more likely to think of ...”

“... breasts, and then reveals that she is not his daughter, but the issue of Olive Wellwood and Anselm Stern, a German puppet-master and theatre designer. Two of Dorothy’s siblings are not the children of Olive, but of Olive’s sister, Violet. Meanwhile, Tom Wellwood, whose sweet spirit has been broken by a vicious Northern boarding school (from which he runs ...”

“... My regrets, however, must be minimal compared to those of the great Alcott scholar Madeleine Stern, one of the two dealers and editors chiefly responsible for identifying and reprinting Alcott’s pseudonymous thrillers in the past twenty years. Stern wrote extensively about A Long Fatal Love Chase in 1987, in her ...”