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“... a serviceable substitute for masturbation. It takes an abundance of imagination, to be sure’ (Karl Kraus). The widespread preoccupation with abortion rates only two entries, one by Laurie Tilsin RN, who is neither an admiral nor a midshipman but, presumably, an American registered nurse. On the general obsession with sex there is Albert Camus: ‘I ...”

“... book that the story of Wittels’s life was the story of his infatuation with three powerful men: Karl Kraus, then Freud, and then the eccentric Viennese analyst Wilhelm Stekel (‘I have committed two crimes in my life,’ Freud remarked, ‘I called attention to cocaine and I introduced Stekel to psychoanalysis’). There are formulaic references to ...”

“... people missing from his roster. And he doesn’t examine people close to politics (except for Karl Liebknecht and Bethmann’s private secretary, Kurt Riezler) with the result that the protracted semi-public debate about how to juggle the Americans’ demands and those of intransigent military leaders is absent. Jasper concentrates instead on the ...”

“... operation. The Mandelstams, Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva make appearances. Rilke drops in, mocked by Karl Kraus. Dante and Wallace Stevens are silently cited. Obviously there is never a dull moment, though the sum total of those moments seems duller than they are. There is an old argument about texture and structure in poetry, and John Crowe Ransom thought ...”

“... Karamazov had suddenly materialised in the close at Barchester. No doubt Wittgenstein’s father, Karl, an Austrian steel magnate, bore some responsibility for the relentless soul-searching, the sense of sin and the pervasive unhappiness that beset his youngest son – and indeed nearly all his sons, for three of Wittgenstein’s four brothers committed ...”

“... the force, the rallying cry that interconnects Goethe, Hölderlin, Hegel, Nietzsche, Rilke, Kraus, Heidegger and Mann and makes their otherwise disparate works seem the constituent parts of a single timeless enterprise; it is that metaphysical power, both internal and external to the human subject, which no single author can master or be an adequate ...”

“... created a decorative and artistic style that seemed to lack force; somewhat later, Adolf Loos and Karl Kraus held that all ornament was criminal, and that civilisation only advanced to the degree that it rejected embellishment altogether, so that the resultant artifacts suggested a certain sterility along with their undoubted strength. Both negative ...”

“... The opening scene of Night Work, Thomas Glavinic’s Viennese novel, recalls something Karl Kraus said about the city in 1914: Vienna was a ‘Versuchsstation des Weltuntergangs’, an experimental station for the apocalypse. Jonas, Glavinic’s protagonist, gets up one morning and switches on the TV. There is no picture, only snow ...”

“... complete self-commitment. Lukacs’s conversion, on this view, is analogous to that of the young Karl Marx: the theorist of alienation converted to Communism under the pressure of political events. And this conversion has been assigned exemplary significance. ‘After Marx,’ Löwy suggests, ‘Lukacs is probably the most important traditional intellectual ...”

“... visions of what might transcend it. This is what makes ‘positive’ utopias so ideological. As Karl Kraus remarked of psychoanalysis, they are part of the problem to which they pose as a solution. This is surely obvious enough in accounts of alien abductions, in which you are transported to what looks for all the world like your local Accident and ...”

“... is still in our possession’) became a cliché of Austrian propaganda, bitterly lampooned by Karl Kraus in his play The Last Days of Mankind – the phrase repeated again and again as Austria slides into oblivion. The new states of Poland and Ukraine battled for the city in 1918, touching off a pogrom that killed more than a hundred Jews. Poland ...”

“... who had previously promoted stylish philosophical authors such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Karl Kraus, but he was rebuffed. He seems to have taken the rejection in his stride: if his ‘new method’ was worthless, he said, then it was best forgotten, and if it was any good then it would be recognised in due course. In that event philosophers ...”

“... dialogue; and to drain some of the schematic grand guignol out of them. Of course he failed the Karl Kraus test – who didn’t? Kraus quotes some yea-sayer to the effect that Zweig with his novellas had conquered all the languages of the world, and adds two words of his own: ‘except one’. The story went the ...”

“... providing equal opportunities for women. The Viennese cabaret world produced such great minds as Karl Kraus, Egon Friedell and Alfred Polgar while the stars of the Footlights were putting on their lipstick, climbing into their frocks and singing arch little numbers aimed at European intellectuals. While Carole Lombard was making Twentieth Century, the ...”

“... retracing its argument from Goethe through Nietzsche and Jacob Burckhardt to Rilke, Spengler, Karl Kraus and Kafka: and concluded by commending the book to ‘everyone who cares for the survival of literature and of human values. The condition it describes is our condition, and I can think of no other modern book in which it is described so ...”