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“... a mess, 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 to live. (...”

“... or whatever it may be is the master key to the explanation of the whole long story. Michael Mann, however, deliberately places himself mid-way in-between. As a result, he risks being simultaneously attacked by one set of readers for writing potted history at a safe distance from the sources, and by another for theorising at an insufficiently high and ...”

“... just the set or the simulation where the conversations take place. When directors like Michael Mann, whose movie version of Miami Vice has just opened, say they want to make episodes of television series as if they were movies, they mean, among other things, that they want to create a world, a location which is a kind of character. This is as true of TV ...”

“... In the spring​ of 1949 Klaus Mann moved from hotel room to hotel room in Amsterdam and Cannes, contemplating suicide. He was isolated and depressed and sure that the situation in postwar Germany was to blame. He was working on a novel which he intended to call The Last Day. He had already made a botched suicide attempt in Los Angeles, described in almost humorous detail by the hero of his novel, Julian: ‘Trying the other wrist ...”

“... his country’s methods was so great that he broke off relations with former friends (like Thomas Mann) and even his current lover, who championed the sinking. Others were moved to fisticuffs. The social-critical novelist Leonhard Frank overheard a socialist journalist proclaim in a posh Berlin café that the destruction of the Lusitania was ‘the greatest ...”

“... minutiae as though the future of civilisation depended on it. There’s a long letter to William Mann taking him to task for his misconception of the umlaut; and, in the LRB archive, a hilarious correspondence, from the early 1980s, between Keller and the editors, about the distinction between the colon and the semi-colon, the use of the ...”

“... and critics. C.H. Sisson called her ‘in her sobriety … the most naked of poets’, and Rachel Mann’s introduction to this new selection adds that she writes in a ‘tantalising confessional mode’, but no one has ever been certain what life the poems were exposing. She had a happy childhood, by all accounts, but the onset of blindness and increasing ...”

“... symbols are too ‘handy’.) America has a prestigious tradition of such cultural semiologists. William Carlos Williams’s sifting of the American grain (‘to discover the NEW WORLD ... what it has done to us, its quality, its weight, its prophets, its – horrible temper’), H.L. Mencken’s jocular scrutiny of the American language, Edmund Wilson’s ...”

“... in 1985, the year of his death. Tracing the lineage of the encyclopedic novel through Perec, Mann, Proust and Flaubert, he homes in on the figures of Carlo Emilio Gadda and Robert Musil, two ‘engineer-writers’ who have one quality in common: ‘their inability to find an ending’. Despite his own love of arcana and encyclopedic forms, Calvino’s ...”

“... got is a plot or a point, so it feels like three hours of exposition. Casino shares with Michael Mann’s Heat the curious contemporary sense that your really classy crime movie doesn’t have to worry about suspense or story. It’s as if The Godfather, or rather its retrospective status, had made the genre so respectable that we need to be a little bored ...”

“... crash, witnesses the rise of Nazism in Berlin (where he attends parties with Fritz Lang and Thomas Mann), and arrives in Hollywood just in time to fall foul of McCarthyism. Any Human Heart (2002) is narrated by Logan Mountstuart, an English author who knocks about Oxford and London with the likes of Cyril Connolly and Henry Green, reports on the Spanish Civil ...”

“... problems. Parsifal’s sexual-pathological element, which so impressed and disturbed Thomas Mann (an authority on such matters), is one of the Parsifal problems; the issue of whether or not the work is ‘Christian’ is another. Nietzsche isolated these two problems together with a third, which is more peculiarly German: like Hanslick, Nietzsche ...”

“... because of the contradictory manifestations of Modernist effort – how does one reconcile Thomas Mann and Andy Warhol? – he can’t help but see the Modernist instinct as essentially an affirmative urge. Two-thirds of the way through his book, Gay states bluntly that ‘liberalism’ was the ‘fundamental principle of Modernism’. But whose liberalism is ...”

“... immediacy. Michals’s collage portrait of the Sterling Black and Whiters – Ansel Adams, Sally Mann, Robert Frank, Salgado and so on – shows us which reputations were overshadowed by the new high-art photography. At the Tate there are photographs from both camps. One odd effect of the high art/common craft division is that while magazines and newspapers ...”

“... of night school, group therapy and speed dating, took place in the basement. A mural by Charlotte Mann turned the room into a stage set depicting an upmarket holiday home. David spoke of Martin Buber, played a clip from Annie Hall and threw in some tips for tongue-tied office workers; nothing he said seemed stupid or objectionable. At regular intervals we ...”