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“... line of writers. He himself cites Sade, Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Strindberg, Artaud, Bataille and Thomas Bernhard (Guibert admired Bernhard for his tenacity and autobiographical honesty). Because of his heritage and a natural inclination towards the sordid, he approached Aids with a lot less charity and emotion than ...”

“... life of her own when the life she tried to make with her brother failed. She married a proto-Nazi, Bernhard Förster, an anti-semite, nationalist boor whose big dream came true with the founding of Nueva Germania, an Aryan colony in Paraguay. Nietzsche railed against his brother-in-law for his anti-semitism and his pro-German beliefs. He wrote to Elisabeth as ...”

“... Walser? (Ooooh errrg blush, ahem, little cough, um: No, I’m ashamed to say . . .) Had I read Thomas Bernhard? (Yes! – Yes, I have! ‘Wittgenstein’s Nephew’! Yay! Yippee! Wow! Phew! – dodged the bullet that time!) It seemed, for a while at least, that I had yet to be contaminated by the shocking intellectual mediocrity surrounding me at ...”

“... Jelinek was already 22. This was the high-water mark in Austria’s radical postwar renaissance. Thomas Bernhard was the acknowledged leader of the dissident pack, with Peter Handke and the Forum Stadtpark group from Graz representing the next wave of an obligatory avant-garde. Jelinek was at the young end of this group, but gained instant recognition ...”

“... but one of the phrases in the fragment appeared to have been borrowed from the Coptic Gospel of St Thomas, the exception being that showstopper: ‘my wife’. In itself this proved nothing, and in fact the sixth line also departed from Thomas via a syntactical irregularity that made it all but nonsensical. But it raised the ...”

“... the furtive cannibalism, the waiting snipers. Aue falls ill and is looked after by his old comrade Thomas, who contrives to turn up in every scene in the novel. Later, he wanders into a sniper’s sights. A bullet goes clean through his brain. He is given up for dead, but Thomas discovers that he is still alive and steals a ...”

“... explicable populist politics were able to render justice incoherent. Much the same was true of Bernhard Goetz, a gun freak who in 1984 drew a handgun on four black youths making a nuisance of themselves on the New York subway, wounding them all and almost killing one of them. A mixed-race jury, after a trial which, like O.J.Simpson’s (and unlike ...”

“... the Frankfurter Zeitung and altered the paper’s political position, moving it to the right. As Bernhard Fulda concluded in his study of Press and Politics in the Weimar Republic (2009), newspaper ownership didn’t always bring the political dividends it seemed to promise: the press baron Alfred Hugenberg was unable to prevent the almost complete collapse ...”

“... robes, clambering up and down staircases of keys or key-thumping in caverns. ‘After all,’ Thomas Mullaney writes, ‘if a Chinese typewriter is really the size of two ping-pong tables put together, need anything more be said about the deficiencies of the Chinese language?’ To many Western eyes, the characters were so exotic that they seemed to raise ...”