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“... writers usually do, nonetheless. ‘Fame wants to find safety,’ as Canetti has put it. Thomas Mann was notorious for his self-importance and his suspicion of anyone whom he felt might be detecting signs of weakness in him; Thomas Hardy spent his last days writing venomously bad verses against fellow authors whom he felt had patronised him. Across the ...”

“... Saudi Arabia to become its chief supplier. In Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil, Nicholas Shaxson argues that these developments are alarming. While the people who live in Africa’s big oil-producing countries are getting poorer and angrier, their leaders ‘have a rising tide of money at their disposal’ and are ‘fit for mischief’. He ...”

“... once in Roth’s more recent novels. It isn’t difficult to think of Everyman as his tribute to Mann. And if we think of it this way, then the last page may seem especially touching, as it acknowledges that, while Everyman may be Aschenbach, his Tadzio, as he sinks into his final unconsciousness, is not the Varga girl ‘with her long, crinkly auburn hair ...”

“... he ever came to an ordinary heroic role. This was the second of three films he made with Anthony Mann (coming between The Naked Spur and God’s Little Acre): evidently the happiest of his relationships with a major director, though he did remarkable work for Nicholas Ray (Born to Be Bad, On Dangerous Ground), Fritz Lang ...”

“... The novelist Cesare Pavese went so far as to compare De Sica, perhaps ironically, with Thomas Mann, as the author of a national narrative. Had movies superseded literature? The Futurists thought so, proposing in one 1916 manifesto a cinema that would ‘co-operate in the general renewal, taking the place of the literary review (always pedantic) and the ...”

“... best stories, Auden’s marriage and more particularly its immediate aftermath. Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika – who though once-married was not very likely to marry again – was a cabaret artiste whose heroically anti-Nazi material had lost her her German passport, and who therefore approached the nearest Englishman, Christopher Isherwood, and ...”

“... sensibility’ always contained a European admixture, and Figes criticises those – Rilke, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf – who swallowed whole the myth of a completely indigenous ‘Russian soul’. All the great Russians ‘were Europeans too, and the two identities were intertwined and mutually dependent in a variety of ways’. Natasha’s Dance contains ...”

“... Stendhal’s. Along the way, he could be as astringent about such a venerated totem as Flaubert as Nicholas Jenkins is about Trollope: monotonous predictability of plot and characterisation; Bel Ami vastly superior to L’Education sentimentale; a touch of the mountebank. In the 20th century, he pioneered admiration for Svevo in England, and was first off the ...”