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“... Karl Kraus had many enemies, but his friends and admirers are something of a liability too. They insist on his unremitting probity and passion for justice, but his justice was all his own – there was no one else on the bench. ‘His vision was never unsteadied by scepticism,’ Erich Heller wrote. Walter Benjamin asserted that ‘Kraus never offered an argument that had not engaged his whole person ...”

“... brought him, if his public statements are any indication, nothing but misery. His new book, The Kraus Project, returns him to the early 1980s, before he wrote The Corrections and Freedom – two internationally bestselling epics of middle-class white America struggling with marriage, parenthood, illness and climate change – and his two earlier, somewhat ...”

“... In Fin de Siècle Vienna, politics had become the least convincing of the performing arts. Life, Kraus wrote, had become an effort that deserved a better cause. By the turn of the century, it was not politicians but actors, painters, writers and musicians who had captured the imagination of the upper-middle classes ...”

“... could the Cambridge or LSE of this period be considered provincial, however tenuous their grasp of Karl Kraus or Hugo von Hofmannsthal. What is true is that the capitals of the life of the mind were permanently transferred, to London, New York, Chicago and – whether we like it or not – Los Alamos. The intellectual successor states of the Habsburg ...”

“... About Hitler I can’t think of anything to say,’ thus Karl Kraus in a famous aside in 1935. But a great deal has been said about him ever since and no one has been better at saying it than Alan Bullock. His Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, published in 1952, is still the best biography, and one of the best books on the Nazi phenomenon in general ...”

“... then what is to be gained by reminding us of the tangle out of which it was salvaged? If, as Karl Kraus suggested, ‘a poem is good until one knows who wrote it,’ is it not safer to avoid biographical distractions altogether? These issues have particular force in the case of MacDiarmid. This is partly because of the unstable nature of his ...”

“... against both the oligarchs and the intruders. Skilfully manipulated by the populist Dr Karl Lueger, it dominated the capital’s politics from 1895 to 1918. It was directed against ‘the Jews’, elastically defined. Yet, as an entity, as Wistrich shows in his valuable narrative, they scarcely existed. Unlike Prague or Frankfurt, Vienna was not a ...”

“... The Stalinist György Lukacs despised his Habsburgian inheritance; so did Arnold Schoenberg, Karl Kraus and Adolf Loos. Therefore ... Marxists believe that the nature of a society is determined by its economic base; John Kenneth Galbraith believes this. Therefore ... One could turn this game round, if one wanted to. Roger Scruton does not like flat ...”

“... link between the two, there are deeper affinities, including their shared admiration for Karl Kraus and Adolf Loos; but above all, both came to reject the concept of truth as logical correspondence, replacing it with a notion of inner coherence. Trakl occupies a central place not just among the German Expressionist poets who exhibited what he ...”

“... friend at the beginning of the period but fades out of the narrative as it continues. As for poor Karl Kraus, the mentor who had urged and inspired Canetti to write Auto da Fé, his is the most summary dismissal of all. His offence was to support Dollfus, the Austrian Chancellor subsequently murdered by the Nazis, rather than the ineffectual ...”

“... connection between ‘misused words’ and ‘war’, Canetti is following in the footsteps of Karl Kraus,1 to whom he devotes two of the essays in The Conscience of Words. The claim that words are the causes of deeds – and the only causes the satirist is interested in – provides the theoretical foundation for the satirical element in ...”

“... of this holds good. Objection must also be made to Cronin’s comparison between O’Nolan and Karl Kraus. It is made at second hand, and a glance at Walter Benjamin’s essay on Kraus shows such comparison to be disorientating because it is so imprecise. These attempts at perspective fail. Cronin’s other ...”

“... this book, references to Lukacs, Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Adorno, Trotsky, Marcuse, not to speak of Karl Marx himself, are, inevitably, manifold. I have looked in vain, in the Geyer-Ryan piece and elsewhere, for any treatment of the central and drastic fact: all these master spirits, sources, witnesses were Jews or of Jewish origin. No reflection on ...”

“... of Art Nouveau. He was to architecture what Schoenberg was to music, Wittgenstein to philosophy or Karl Kraus to journalism – a scourge of the impure and the superfluous. In ‘Ornament and Crime’ (1908), his fiercest polemic, he associates the Art Nouveau designer with a child smearing walls and a ‘Papuan’ tattooing skin. For Loos the ornate ...”

“... it also resulted in some tendentious misreadings – for instance, his dismissive remarks about Karl Kraus (as epitome of ‘Jewish self-hatred’). For many readers Reich-Ranicki was far too opinionated. It was difficult, as Böll observed, to discern the criteria which led him to praise one book and damn another. These same merits and limitations are ...”