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“... are now written in America, North and South, or perhaps in Germany. The publishers tell us that Günter Grass, when he wrote The Flounder, conceived of it from the outset as a Major Novel; we can console ourselves that it turned out to be vast but boring and even absurd, all shouting and rusé showmanship. English admirers of The Crying of Lot 49 are ...”

“... saw the decline of the staunchly pacifist left (its most prominent intellectual supporter, Günter Grass, had said that a united Germany would inevitably turn into a ‘monster’). The group’s deepest fear was expressed on a steel-grey poster ominously announcing: ‘Germany is becoming more German.’ At the same time, the so-called New Right ...”

“... feels the need to say: “I am a proud Scot.”’ The bus party was an idea I had borrowed from Günter Grass. In 1964, during a particularly dreary West German election in which nobody dared to speak their mind, he herded writers and artists into a bus and led them round the small towns of northern Germany. His intention was first to ask people what ...”

“... place, preferring to live in West Berlin outside that dispensation, when not in outright exile. Günter Grass’s new novel, Eine weites Feld, proposes another solution, a more radical and scandalous one. The scandal predictably aroused the outrage of all those (and they were and are many) who thought that politics could now be abandoned once and for ...”

“... elections, before any constitutional negotiation – did not appeal to every kind of German. Günter Grass complained that errors are already multiplying in our behaviour toward the German Democratic Republic ... There has been a revolution. Yet, in their very first moments of freedom ... before they have had time to begin to live their own history ...”

“... wife Camilla indulge in orgies of this: ‘We consigned to the flames or the waves one Gunter Grass, two John Fowles, a Nabokov, a John Berger, three Doris Lessings, a Gore Vidal, two John Barths, and the whole of Jorge Luis Borges.’ This impatience with literary artefacts means that he and Camilla are also veteran walkers-out at the theatre. ‘Before ...”

“... Since then, according to Gay, the noteworthy protagonists of the modern have dwindled in number. Günter Grass, Gabriel García Márquez: when they are gone, the last vestiges of the modern will be gone. But then comes the epilogue, with Gay’s trip to Bilbao, and in the embrace of Gehry’s brilliance he finds a glimmer of hope. Modernism ‘has had a ...”

“... country. It is partisan rather than diagnostic, and in comparison with radical satire of the kind Günter Grass brings to bear on modern Germany, Midnight’s Children may look inadequate to its subject. One recalls 18th-century satire, however, and the animus directed by Pope and Swift against some small, personal targets. There is satire that rises ...”

“... he has written elsewhere, extolling the commitment of figures such as Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll. And what became true later had, according to Craig, also been true earlier. The Politics of the Unpolitical performs a balancing act, praising the chosen writers of the decades before unification by criticising the ...”

“... is one of Germany’s leading public intellectuals. He belongs to the same generation as Günter Grass and Jürgen Habermas, although he has been less bien pensant, less predictable, than either. His early poetry, lyric verse with a strong political content, won him the Georg Büchner Prize and he is now widely regarded as Germany’s foremost ...”

“... of novelists who prefer to say as little as repetitiously as possible. Butler says nothing about Günter Grass, nothing about the younger Latin American writers whom Gabriel Garcia Marquez plausibly described as the best alternative to the sterility of the nouveau roman. Thomas Pynchon appears only in lists of names, and Gravity’s Rainbow, arguably ...”

“... and begins to sound like J.B. Priestley at the wartime microphone: ‘In their new books’ Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll ‘have both turned into what in my childhood were called “worrits”. Since we can worry well enough for ourselves, and in any case lack no assistance or guidance from newspapers and television, this may strike us as ...”

“... Cold War’. In addition to Bradbury’s invented personages the conferees include Martin Amis, Günter Grass and Susan Sontag (she skips one of the later conferences in the narrative, on the grounds that there is something more interesting going on in Northern Italy). Bradbury’s Villa Barolo is funded by the American Magno Foundation – offspring ...”

“... into something called ‘magic realism’, this American speciality – whether adopted by Günter Grass or Salman Rushdie or the authors of the Latin American boom – has been promoted into a genuinely global genre, and we glimpse, outside the confines of an American Programme Era, the outlines of some wholly different world system of letters ...”

“... incompletely harmonised, aspects of what, cumulatively, I appear to have stood for. A phrase by Günter Grass describes the predicament well: that of the ‘intellectual without mandate’. A complicated situation arose in late 1993 when, after seeming to be the approved voice of the Palestinian struggle, I wrote increasingly sharply of my ...”