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“... while paying little attention to the sly comedy that subverts any pretensions to grandeur. W.G. Sebald called The Melancholy of Resistance ‘a book about a world into which the Leviathan has returned’, and Susan Sontag saw it as ‘both an anatomy of desolation, desolation at its most appalling, and a stirring manual of resistance to desolation ...”

“... Michael Bracewell, Dick Hebdige, Lynne Tillman, Kathy Acker, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Johnson, W.G. Sebald. The eateries and supermarkets of Aberdeen are visited, and rendered, as far as I can see, entirely accurately. (I come from Aberdeen, which is how I’d know.) Ditto the hills walked and the stone circles visited. Ditto the dream-tour, in the second ...”

“... Augustus John supplied the images for a translation into Romany Welsh. More recently, W.G. Sebald searched out FitzGerald’s grave in the churchyard in the village of Boulge in Suffolk, and, in the same way that FitzGerald chose to speak through Omar Khayyám, Sebald seems in The Rings of Saturn to speak through ...”

“... presence of the translator: we like to think that the book in front of us is Vertigo by W.G. Sebald (say), whereas really it is Vertigo, a version of Sebald’s Schwindel. Gefühle. by Michael Hulse. In the Belfast poems, the movement of words from one place or voice to another is a focus of attention. Carson ...”

“... one another. In a series of episodic chapters, some accompanied by photos in the manner of W.G. Sebald, he juxtaposes the banal sites and events of his own Salisbury childhood – the barrel-vaulted cellar where he ate his first pizza, the shop where he bought his first windcheater – with the lives and deaths of others. He briefly mentions someone called ...”

“... of the past in the present: he had the habit – like a rather more anodyne (and cheerful) W.G. Sebald – of seeing a landscape historically, from the Peddar’s Way in East Anglia to the Isle of Portland, where he looks at the quarries from which the geologically ancient stones of St Paul’s Cathedral, Regent Street and the Cenotaph were ...”

“... of the Ottomans before the gates of Vienna in 1683. In On the Natural History of Destruction W.G. Sebald asked himself whether among the reasons for the silence surrounding the bombing of German cities was a sense among postwar Germans that criminals and victims could not be properly differentiated: that they felt they deserved what happened. Hence the ...”

“... to judge but it reads very fluently; it seems Searls is to Fosse what Anthea Bell was to W.G. Sebald, the best possible intermediary. There’s such carry in the prose that you quickly stop noticing the lack of full stops, though if you pause to examine the resources Fosse uses to move things along from one observation to the next it’s striking to see ...”

“... between travel books and novels. As Raban argues, his travel narratives – like those of W.G. Sebald – are fictions. They are not transcriptions, rattled out as the journey progresses, but artful reconstructions, patterned and plotted like novels. It does not follow, however, that the travel writer’s tricks can be transplanted to a novel. There ...”

“... perfectly that his own apparent decency and the brutal methods of the colonel who has come to wage war on the local barbarians are instruments of the same regime. ‘I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy, he the truth that Empire tells when harsh winds blow.’Still, the wish to live outside history is not itself shameful, only ...”

“... end of the war in the Allied attack on Tokyo, and in On the Natural History of Destruction, W.G. Sebald describes the ten thousand tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs dropped on the densely populated residential areas of Hamburg in the summer of 1943. The horror would appear to be associated with the fact that the attacker also dies. Dropping cluster ...”

“... 1947 as Lingua Tertii Imperii, a study of language under the Third Reich, and in Austerlitz W.G. Sebald discusses the bureaucratese of genocide. In emphasising the formative powers of language and the irrational lure of supercharged meanings, Cassirer aligns himself with a familiar principle of cultural critique. But these late thoughts never developed into ...”

“... write much about walks or landscapes, but he did once mention how much he distrusted the way W.G. Sebald, in his much admired Rings of Saturn (1995), ‘morosely trudged through the Suffolk spaces without really looking at them’. This was ‘mittelbrow miserablism’, Fisher continued, ‘an anachronistic, antiqued model of “good literature”’; he ...”

“... the influences reviewers have detected as informing All the Devils Are Here. They offered W.G. Sebald, Seabrook snorts. He’s no melancholy walker. There is nothing ambiguous about the photographs he hammers into his texts. They are pure archive, filched from tabloid libraries: Freddie Mills posing in his trunks (low angle, hard shadows), the murdered ...”

“... recently enjoyed some popularity, not only in the work of writers such as Jonathan Raban and W.G. Sebald, but also in historical re-enactments such as Channel 4’s 1900 House and 1940s House, which have exposed their participants to the rigours of a previous age. BBC2 responded with The Trench, whose volunteers were subjected to simulated barrages, mud and ...”