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“... without falling prey to a barbarous irrationalism? It is a problem that haunts the pages of Thomas Mann – another refugee from Hitler – for whose Doctor Faustus Adorno acted as musicological adviser. In fact, Modernism in general is shot through with a desire for some solid truth while at the same time mourning its elusiveness. Modernist ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The Mann family romance is among the tragic real-life soap operas of the century, a large-cast drama of genius, talent, fame and infamy, fraternal hatred, rocky and rock-hard marriages, open and covert sexual deviancy, secrets and suicides. It provided material for Thomas, Heinrich, Erika and Klaus Mann’s novels and plays, and for plenty of biographies and psycho-literary studies besides ...”

“... With the deaths of Thomas Mann in 1955 and of Bertolt Brecht and Gottfried Benn in 1956, a major era in the history of German literature comes to an end. These three are not only the greatest writers of their age, they are also its witnesses. Each of them worked in a different genre: Thomas Mann in the convoluted, partly essayistic prose of his novels, Bert Brecht in the drama and narrative poetry of social dialectics, Benn in the lyrical poetry of radical Modernism ...”

“... and I scribble each morning almost as if demented by years of fictional starvation. I feel like Thomas Mann when he spoke of the ‘passionate truancy’ of his political speeches and writings in opposition to Hitler: a truancy which aided rather than subtracted from his creative work. After eight years in rural Suffolk I was fed up with life as a ...”

“... the great photographer August Sander and a number of remarkable movies. Weitz picks out six names: Thomas Mann, Brecht, Kurt Weill, Heidegger and the less familiar theorist Siegfried Kracauer and the artist Hannah Höch. One could as easily add, say, Carl Schmitt on the (rare) intellectual right, Ernst Bloch on the far left and the great Max Weber in the ...”

“... names and destinies. It would have been relatively easy to write a story around the big names – Thomas Mann, Freud, Adorno, Schoenberg and their kind – but this is not Palmier’s strategy. He doesn’t find a meaningful pattern in the data he records. Personal idiosyncrasy and historical accident have more to do with the dispositions and destinies ...”

“... For the Sake of Argument records a life of action, of being in the right place at the right time. Thomas Mann could never find the revolution: Hitchens cannot help tripping over it. This is, no doubt, the privilege of the foreign correspondent, but some are clearly more privileged than others. He turns up in Central America, in Central Europe, in Eastern ...”

“... for] blond Hans Hansen and blonde Inge Holm’ – the love of the outsider for the insider. Thomas Mann made Tonio dark and shy and half Latin American. Being Thomas Mann, he couldn’t make him Jewish, but as an expression of the story’s theme, he might just as well have done. After the war the adolescent ...”

“... literary correspondents and holiday hosts: Stein and Toklas, Gide and Wilder, Carl van Vechten, Thomas Mann and Paul Cadmus. For Steward, a life in letters compensated (partly) for the one restrained by law and social convention. And by syphilis, picked up from a railway porter and necessitating a period of celibacy. The cure involved weekly injections ...”

“... in her choices of heroes and heroines, all solitary, intrepid, self-determining figures – Thomas Mann, Simone Weil, Vladimir Nabokov – and it is most eloquently displayed in her essay on Melville’s Bartleby. As in her last volume of essays, Seduction and Betrayal, which had among its female victims and survivors a very persuasive account of ...”

“... the music of the Act Two encounter is a thrillingly unequivocal rendering of an ideal copulation. (Thomas Mann was not wrong when he spoke of the opera’s ‘lascivious desire for bed’.) But Act Three makes it clear that the eroticism is more means than end, a platform for the propaganda against lucidity; that the deepest subject is the surrender of ...”

“... It contains memoir, pieces on writers Anglophone editors might have heard of (Hans Fallada, Thomas Mann, Walter Kempowski, Ovid) and two forays into social criticism. It’s a useful introduction to a body of work in which what isn’t being said, or isn’t being said in the expected way, can be as significant as what is. ‘Open Bookkeeping’, a ...”

“... make an interesting study: James Joyce dreaming of becoming the agent for Irish tweeds in Trieste, Thomas Mann musing that he would have made a good banker, Samuel Beckett contemplating a career as a pilot. ‘I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously nor too stupid about machines to qualify as a commercial pilot,’ Beckett wrote to ...”

“... of class-conflicts. In a great novel – so Lukács – in a major fiction by Balzac, Tolstoy or Thomas Mann, the ripening of the epic and of tragic and comic drama is harvested and given full deployment. It is only minor, ephemeral fiction, by which Lukács intends psychological miniaturism on the one hand and naturalism or verismo on the other, which ...”