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“... make his own tools before he can achieve anything. This, presumably, is the primitive need which Peter Mann’s From Author to Reader is intended to supply. Mann’s perspective is severely sociological, and his aim to lay a groundwork of conceptual starting-points. From Author to Reader has a superficially theoretic ...”

“... Clare Winston are well-known as the authors of elegant and accurate translations of some of Thomas Mann’s essays and correspondence, including The Letters of Thomas Mann, 1889-1955. While annotating that selection, Richard Winston began assembling material for what he intended to be an extensive biography of the writer. It ...”

“... not to mention a pain in the neck. Imagine what it’s like for the writer. Or for Marlon.William Mann does not have the field to himself. There are at least a dozen biographies of Brando, or memoirs that depend on his presence. The weightiest of these is Peter Manso’s, published in 1994, when Brando still had ten years ...”

“... The double centenary​ in 2012 of the publication of Kafka’s The Judgment and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice was marked only, to my knowledge, by a single conference, in California. Yet these two stories represented crucial breakthroughs for writers who came to dominate the German literature of the age. Both experienced a creative liberation thanks to forces seemingly beyond the conscious efforts that were getting them nowhere – in old-fashioned terms, thanks to inspiration ...”

“... roll-call of radical Jewish dissent extends from Adorno and Benjamin through Kafka and Lukacs to Peter Weiss and Arnold Zweig. But his argument simplifies a more complex problem. His generalisations about Jewish trouble-makers would apply almost equally well to a Catholic like Heinrich Böll, a Marxist like Brecht or a feminist like Christa ...”

“... palatial style here but so did Spencer’s ex-friend the convicted fraudster Darius Guppy; Simon Mann, the leader of the attempted mercenary coup in Equatorial Guinea in 2004; and Teodorin Nguema, the playboy son of the Equatoguinean dictator, Obiang Nguema, whom Mann was trying to overthrow. It was Thatcher’s ...”

“... Cambridge only woke up to the great achievements of Peter Stern when he died there aged 70 in 1991. Stern’s adoptive university, to which he found himself evacuated from the LSE after arriving from Prague as a refugee from Nazi anti-Semitism, became his home for half a century; but although he taught there for many years and remained devoted to his college, St John’s, Cambridge failed adequately to recognise his stature during his lifetime ...”

“... Thomas and Katia Mann had six children. It was clear from early on that Katia most loved the second child, Klaus, who was born in 1906, and that Thomas loved Erika, the eldest, born in 1905, and also Elisabeth, born in 1918. The other three – the barely tolerated ones – were Golo, born in 1909, Monika, born in 1910, and Michael, born in 1919 ...”

“... as a Stoic painter, practising the virtues of restraint and discretion they recommended. Richard Mann’s study of El Greco’s patrons is highly appropriate to a new series of monographs on art history of which the editors are Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny. It is the author’s first book, a revised version of a doctoral thesis supervised by Professor ...”

“... of images of great men. But many early art photographs do recall paintings. Country people in Peter Henry Emerson’s pictures from the 1880s and 1890s of rural life in East Anglia have a Millet-like quietness. Alvin Langdon Coburn’s photogravures of London at night taken in the early 1900s emulate the inky fogs and soft highlights of contemporary ...”

“... as A Book of Memories, wildly oversold (‘claiming and extending the legacy of Proust and Mann’, ‘one of the great novels of modern times’), fantastically turgid, an all but unreadable version of the versnobter bonkbuster it so unmistakably remains. Had I not been reviewing it, there is no stage at which I would not have stopped reading A Book ...”

“... War. In his new book, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, the inordinately prolific and widely admired Peter Gay has much to say about the creativity of the moderns but surprisingly little about their negativity. He conceives of Modernism in older terms as principally an intellectual and artistic grouping bent on liberation rather than as a broader frame of mind ...”

“... photographer August Sander and a number of remarkable movies. Weitz picks out six names: Thomas Mann, Brecht, Kurt Weill, Heidegger and the less familiar theorist Siegfried Kracauer and the artist Hannah Höch. One could as easily add, say, Carl Schmitt on the (rare) intellectual right, Ernst Bloch on the far left and the great Max Weber in the middle. In ...”

“... of Kipling). Indeed, the last essay in Bartleby in Manhattan is an attack on an English critic, Peter Conrad, for trying his hand at just this sort of thing. In these American observers and explainers two characteristics recur. The first is a close attention to the significance of detail (‘no ideas but in things’) which is often left to speak for ...”

“... and destinies. It would have been relatively easy to write a story around the big names – Thomas Mann, Freud, Adorno, Schoenberg and their kind – but this is not Palmier’s strategy. He doesn’t find a meaningful pattern in the data he records. Personal idiosyncrasy and historical accident have more to do with the dispositions and destinies of his ...”