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“... epoch, just as they do the life of the novel’s voyeuristic, emotionally autistic narrator, Michael Owen, whose finger hovers constantly by the freeze-frame button as he drools over videos. The Thatcherite Eighties were all about emotionally retarded men excitedly glued to screens, manipulating signs to conjure fortunes into being as arbitrarily as the ...”

“... 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 liberalism is ...”

“... This German novel has waited nearly forty years for its English translator. Michael Hofmann fell in love the moment the Good Fairy told him about it, and set out to liberate it from the thorn hedge of neglect. The Good Fairy, in this case, was a Berlin bookseller ‘who First recommended Koeppen’. Wolfgang Koeppen is 86 ...”

“... discussions of some of history’s ‘higher cribbers’: Borges, Montaigne, Stevenson, Eliot, Mann and Harold Bloom; Michel Tournier and Alain Robbe-Grillet; pretend pretenders to the throne, Perkin Warbeck and Lambert Simnel; Napoleon’s chef Dunand; and ‘the genitally preoccupied Roman epigrammatist Martial’. I found some of the recipes in The ...”

“... describes Kafka as ‘this non-breeder’. In Daniel Kehlmann’s German this is ‘nachwuchsloser Mann’, a man without descendants, literally without aftergrowth. In Julie Orringer’s English, based on Peter Esterházy’s Hungarian, Kafka becomes a ‘barren man’, which in Laurent Binet’s French becomes ‘cet homme desséché’, this dried-up ...”

“... the camp inmates call the milk ‘you’ throughout. In other translations (by John Felstiner and Michael Hamburger, for example) and in the German text, they start by calling the milk ‘it’ and then move to ‘you’. I like the (incorrect) intimacy from the start, and confess that I had to look at several editions to find out what is happening. I ...”

“... the form they had before his sister cut, forged, destroyed and elided them. In fact, according to Michael Tanner, the work has been so extensive that Nietzsche has been reappropriated by just about everyone: ‘existentialists, phenomenologists, and then increasingly, during the 1960s and 1970s . . . critical theorists, post-structuralists and ...”

“... of the revolution.Further west, in Princeton, or much further, in Pacific Palisades, Thomas Mann and his family spent diverting evenings – this in 1939 – debating which of Zweig, Ludwig, Feuchtwanger and Remarque was the worst writer. Emil Ludwig himself, in an obituary, wrote that none of Zweig’s writings had affected him in a way that could ...”

“... Allgemeine Zeitung and elsewhere. Christa Wolf surely knows what she is about, following Thomas Mann to Pacific Palisades fifty years later. Not that Wolf is completely without blame herself. It seems to me that she did three things wrong: she retained her allegiance to (an idea of) East Germany when it was too late for that; she pulled out of her ...”

“... to Communism to be explained? A number of studies have attempted to resolve this enigma, notably Michael Löwy’s From Romanticism to Bolshevism, first published in French in 1976.1 Lukacs himself, towards the end of his life, lifted the curtain on his early years in a number of interviews and in a memoir entitled Gelebtes Denken.2 More recently, Lee ...”

“... beauty, ‘The Invention of Morel’ (1940). This strenuous animation, by the design team Casson Mann, tries to overcome the atmosphere of a waxworks museum. Christopher Frayling, the ‘guest curator’, writes a museological piece in the catalogue, a luxurious and mighty tome, about the tricky history of costume display and changing styles in mannequins ...”

“... be the good reason that the author has something important to lose if he’s recognised. Patrick Mann’s novels (Steal Big, Dog Day Afternoon) carry the front-cover information that ‘Patrick Mann is the pseudonym of a former US Army Intelligence agent who has for many years been a crime reporter for a nationwide ...”

“... a way of life’. Her artless title is taken from a letter Helen Lowe-Porter wrote to Thomas Mann after she became his English translator. She was, she said later, an ‘unknown instrument … which … must … serve him to change the garment of his art into a better one which might clothe her for the marketplace until times changed’. ‘Like a ...”

“... pursuits to write imitation Agatha Christie detective stories, so when I first learned that Michael Dummett, widely regarded as the most formidable philosopher of his generation, was about to publish a book about Tarot cards, I rather naturally assumed that it must be an exercise of this same recreational sort. In a certain very off-centre sense, my ...”

“... Guðmundsson writes, ‘the first Icelandic celebrity’ – a Großschriftsteller like Thomas Mann, someone who ‘was becoming a kind of cultural president of the nation’, and whose travels ‘had started to take on the air of state visits’. For a couple of years, it seemed to be his life’s work to avoid accepting an invitation to Bulgaria.No ...”