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“... face getting hold of the German version at least to compare translations – but Sanders and Goldstein haven’t done badly, though they haven’t been above such things as ‘back on track’ or ‘total eating pleasure’ or the description of a flaccid penis ‘lying on my thigh with infantine disinterest’. The impression they give – faithfully, I ...”

“... After a lost war, Hofmannsthal said, one should write comedies, and in the Twenties, within his limitations and against his genius, he did just that. I wonder what he would prescribe for the countries of Eastern Europe – many of them former Habsburg territories – after what is infinitely worse than a lost war: regional entropy; systemic collapse; an abrupt close brackets on an experiment that failed; a largely bloodless and painfully incomplete reversion to the status quo ante of forty, fifty, even ninety years ago; future generations exposed to the deleterious half-lives of political, industrial and human debris; the discrediting of one set of political ideas in favour of another, older, just as discredited and probably far more violent – the belief in race and nation ...”