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“... get a lot for your 90 cents on the subway) was revealed to me. The truth came in a remark made by Heinrich vonKleist: ‘One could divide people into two classes, those who understand themselves by metaphor, and those who understand themselves by formula. Those who understand themselves by both are too few to make up ...”

“... There​ are few suicide notes more ecstatic than those of Heinrich vonKleist and Henriette Vogel, who died together on 21 November 1811. ‘May heaven grant you a death even half as joyous and inexpressibly cheerful as mine,’ Kleist wrote to his sister ...”

“... on about it and, as it were, getting nowhere before at last getting to the madhouse. The life of Heinrich vonKleist, discussed by Nigel Reeves in Romanticism and the Sciences, was exactly fashioned around this collapse. Reason was revealed to be a fraud, the world a perverted madhouse, peopled with spectral ...”

“... has sent A., the hero of The Viaduct, to prison no longer seems of any significance to him. For Kleist, as imagined in No Place on Earth, ‘the passion which swept him away ... was the seduction of words far more than the need to communicate with any particular human being.’ In Malcolm Bradbury’s Rates of Exchange, stories are a currency like any ...”

“... of canonical allusions to be pored over: as well as Dostoevsky and Plato, there is Don Quixote, Heinrich vonKleist, Bach and, of course, the Gospels. David is preoccupied with whether people ‘recognise’ him; towards the book’s climax, such as it is, there is a census, an ‘orgy of measurement’. Clearly, The ...”

“... all about des Gedankens Blässe – the pale cast of thought. Others played on the same theme. For Heinrich Heine the Germans reigned supreme only ‘in the realm of dreams’; Marx sneered that they had only thought what other peoples had done. These contemporary cadences were surely in the mind of a modern historian, Rolf Engelsing, when he suggested that ...”

“... portrayed at Port-au-Prince, only funerals. In fact, Buch is paying homage to a short story by Heinrich vonKleist, ‘The Betrothal at Santo Domingo’ (1811). Here a Swiss fugitive during the native rebellion mistrusts the half-breed girl to whom he has proposed, and shoots her dead before she has time to agree to ...”

“... exercise’ done to see if he could create a narrative as ‘relentless’ as those he admired in Heinrich vonKleist, sacrificing ‘psychological complexity’ in order to wield ‘that really marvellous tool for a novelist, the sense of forward motion’. Once the narrative is underway, he drives it with all the ...”

“... decent thing. At 84, the old man simply would not die. Worse, his ‘over-mighty subject’ Otto von Bismarck, in spite of constant illness and breakdowns, continued to exercise his power over the old emperor. The crown prince felt utterly useless: ‘fifty years, life therefore behind me, idle observer in daily self-denial, discipline practised over a ...”

“... than to Shakespeare or Goethe, an oratorical rather than a poetic genius. Hildegard Freifrau Hugo von Spitzemberg, the greatest diarist of the previous generation in Germany and the mother of one of Kessler’s friends, knew him well. Kessler dined with her almost weekly during the 1890s. Kessler had no idea that the ‘fat old lady’ at whose table he dined ...”

“... obtained in the Garden of Eden. One of the most haunting meditations on this Faustian theme is Heinrich vonKleist’s essay of 1810, ‘On the Marionette Theatre’. Perfect grace is attainable by mechanical dancing puppets because they have a single centre of gravity; their movements are undisturbed by ...”

“... taking holidays. Long before he met Katia in Munich he had seen the portrait by Fritz August von Kaulbach of her as a Pierrette with her four brothers as Pierrots. ‘The young Thomas,’ Katia wrote in her book Unwritten Memories, who was 14 years old at the time the picture was done (I was six), was still living in Lübeck and, like so many ...”

“... use of Pervitin became official military policy for the invasion of France in 1940. Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, the army’s commander in chief, requested a directive detailing the optimal doses and frequencies in order to maximise the drug’s benefits and minimise its negative consequences. On 17 April a ‘stimulant decree’ written by Ranke was sent ...”