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“... 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 ...”

“... work the right form to express poetically his own recent raw experience – is one to which T.J. Reed, in his excellent account of Goethe in Weimar, The Classical Centre, pays close attention. As he says, Goethe’s poetry ‘was all born of particular occasions’. Reed persuasively shows how Goethe emerged, during what ...”

“... often been attacked for its politics. It is, in its way, a conservative manifesto. Yet, as T.J. Reed has observed in Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition, there is an air of unreality in Mann’s account of the issues involved – he is not in the least interested in the process by which political decisions are reached or enacted. ‘Democratic politics’ is ...”

“... gay film – was far closer to the writer’s secret life than most people had imagined. T.J. Reed says in the Cambridge Companion that ‘any observant reader of the works’ would have guessed what the diaries revealed, but this is being a trifle optimistic about Mann’s readers, even the observant ones. Still, it is true, as Andrew Weber suggests in ...”

“... accompanying banners, most of them hard to read. Maybe this isn’t an army on the move – the reed platforms are odd – but some kind of propaganda gathering. The black square on its pole tallies with a reminiscence of the architect Lubetkin, who said he saw the squares, black and red, being carried as a kind of totem – first elements in a language ...”