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“... The summer​ lay there, waiting to finish. Autumn was when the strangers were expected, the hop merchants from Austria, Germany and England, the rich men off whom many people in our town made their livings. The summer lay there, and it spawned various illnesses. People got belly-aches and died from eating rotten fruit, the water ran out in the wells, a couple of pine forests burned down, and the dry grass on the steppes caught alight ...”

“... When Joseph Roth was asked once to write about his earliest memory, he described how as a baby he had seen his mother strip his cradle and hand it over to a strange woman, who ‘holds it to her chest, as though it were some trifling object of negligible dimensions, speaks for a long time, smiles, showing her long yellow teeth, goes to the door and leaves the house ...”

“... With Joseph Roth, you begin – and end – with the prose. The great delight of this Austrian novelist, who wrote in the Twenties and Thirties, lies in his strange, nimble, curling sentences, which are always skewing into the most unexpected metaphors. It is rare to find luminous powers of realism and narrative clarity so finely combined with a high poetic temperature ...”

“... the confidence, the self-deprecating humour and the sense of danger to be found in the whole work. Joseph Roth was a survivor from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which he made the object of both affection and criticism in his novels. He is best-known for a family history, Radetsky March. Weights and Measures is a short piece, first published in 1937; like a ...”

“... pylons walking through the erasures in the Bayrischer Wald ... Once before, I left some lines of Joseph Roth bleeding on your desk: ‘I had no father – that is, I never knew my father – but Zipper had one. That made my friend seem quite privileged, as though he had a parrot or a St Bernard.’ All at once, my nature as a child hits me. I was a ...”

“... he’ll make himself so ridiculous that it’ll all be over.’ This was not an uncommon view. Joseph Roth, who was also in Berlin at the time, had for years been warning complacent peers against treating Hitler as a clown. He left for Paris that day in January 1933 and reiterated the point in a letter to Stefan Zweig a fortnight later: ‘Quite apart ...”

“... dreary and clothy sprog of the electric 1880s; this un-Austrian Austrian and un-Jewish Jew (Joseph Roth – who has certainly spoiled me for Zweig – was both, to the max); not a pacifist much less an activist but a passivist; this professional adorer, schmoozer, inheritor and collector, owner of Beethoven’s desk and Goethe’s pen and Leonardo ...”

“... In​ an essay entitled ‘Twenty Minutes from before the War’, Joseph Roth describes how in the 1920s French cinema audiences (and no doubt others elsewhere in Europe) lapped up compilations of pre-1914 documentary footage. They watched endless shots of military parades and goosenecked beauties with hats and fans and all-day hairstyles and floor-length dresses and gentlemen in full fig and they died laughing ...”

“... in Jewish populations, in the Eastern marches of Austria-Hungary (think of the Galician, Joseph Roth). In Celan’s case, this came to him from his mother: German was, in every sense, his mother-tongue. Already as a boy, he loved poetry, first Goethe and Schiller, then Hölderlin, Heine, Trakl, Kafka and in particular Rilke. He spoke ...”

“... useful not to be pure. If I may return to the question: don’t you feel yourself, you Philip Roth, ‘rooted’ in your country, and at the same time ‘a mustard grain’? In your books I perceive a sharp mustard flavour. I think this is the meaning of your quotation from Arnaldo Momigliano. Italian Jews (but the same can be said of the Jews of many ...”

“... debased by Nazism. Hofmann is a prolific translator of German prose (Kafka, Wolfgang Koeppen, Joseph Roth and currently Gert Hofmann). He is also editing the selected works of Rilke. His own poetry enjoys a tacit dialogue with the works of Rilke and Hofmannsthal, and suggests a sympathy for the values of High Modernist Vienna (the European precursor ...”

“... of what interests me in Sperber comes from the fact that he was born ten years after the novelist Joseph Roth, and that his life follows the same movements as Roth’s: born in a village in Galicia, came to Vienna as a child, went to Berlin in the Twenties, visited the Soviet Union, and went into exile in ...”

“... and absence. ‘A Morning in Vicenza’ goes on to become an elegy to two admired friends, Joseph Brodsky and Krzysztof Kieslowski, but it could have gone anywhere (I quoted the first of its three stanzas). This unpredictability, storylessness, geographical unattachment, is a feature of Zagajewski; the Selected Poems (cut down from a somewhat longer ...”

“... that are wall-to-wall English-language originals. Chatto – home of Chekhov, Proust and Joseph Roth – recently went through three or four seasons without any translations at all. Obviously, publishing isn’t what it was, the bottom line has risen inexorably, there were all the huge and much-bruited takeovers and mergers and acquisitions, but ...”

“... loads the chapters with epigraphs from Bataille, Sacher-Masoch, Great Expectations, Montaigne, Joseph Roth, The Winter’s Tale and so on: the impression is of a glove-like fit between the narrator’s linguistic and allusive range and the author’s. Felix is not so much an unreliable narrator as a sinisterly ubiquitous one, smoothly present at all ...”