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“... Town and Table Mountain. Among those who have bought houses here are Earl Spencer, Elton John and Michael Douglas, but the oddity is that, while you might assume, as you drive through its wonderful avenues, that Constantia’s residents are nothing if not respectable, you’d be dead wrong, because not only did Mark set himself up in palatial style here but ...”

“... not to mention a pain in the neck. Imagine what it’s like for the writer. Or for Marlon.William Mann does not have the field to himself. There are at least a dozen biographies of Brando, or memoirs that depend on his presence. The weightiest of these is Peter Manso’s, published in 1994, when Brando still had ten years to live. (...”

“... partly modelled on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. The third, a collaboration with the classicist Michael Silk, was a formidably detailed study of the genesis, significance and legacy of The Birth of Tragedy. One celebrated but parenthetical aside in that work was accorded cardinal importance in Stern’s writings: ‘for only as an aesthetic phenomenon is ...”

“... gain control, and insist on the absolute primacy of military values and homeland defence, as Michael Mann shows in Incoherent Empire (2003). In today’s USA this conversion is especially tempting: the military are widely popular, because their values are perceived as contrary to those of neoliberal economics: the army is seen as a place where rules ...”

“... Now that works such as Francis Haskell’s Patrons and Painters (first published in 1963) and Michael Levey’s Painting at Court (1971) have made the social history of art respectable, it is becoming quite difficult to remember the time when it was virtually restricted, or abandoned, to a handful of Central European Marxist émigrés such as Frederick ...”

“... the motions of an amputated limb. Or at least that Bolivar can’t renounce power, that as Thomas Mann says in a similar context, we can’t live morally or spiritually from not wanting. We would have to want something else, like Bolivar’s friend and favourite Antonio Jose de Sucre, who prefers his family to the lures of high office. Not that the preference ...”

“... undiscriminatingly idolatrous of all literary forbears: Kafka, Gogol, James, Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, Chekhov etc. There is something very American in this comprehensive deference to literary celebrity. It’s true that all these writers deserve great respect, but a bit too good to be true that nobody, in Roth’s world, is ill-judging enough to conceive a ...”

“... Auteurs de ma vie’. Earlier titles included works by Stefan Zweig on Tolstoy, Thomas Mann on Schopenhauer, Paul Valéry on Descartes, and contributions from living writers such as Marie-Hélène Lafon (on Flaubert) and Michel Schneider (on Pascal). The series was started in 2016, and the most recent book in the set, before Kristeva’s, was a ...”

“... have been more misleading than this one. Nor is it just a question of writers like Proust and Mann, who may be said to belong to the last flowering of the 19th century. In the 1980s the tradition of setting a certain kind of novel ‘one generation back’ in time remains as vital as ever. We are accustomed to the paradox that most people’s notions of ...”

“... born in 1917, awarded the Nobel Prize in 1972 (the first German writer thus honoured since Thomas Mann in 1929 – Hermann Hesse having adopted Swiss citizenship, and Nelly Sachs Swedish) and died in 1985. He was an early instance, an avatar, of the writer as right thinker, as influencer, like Rushdie, like Solzhenitsyn, like Pasolini: his was the public ...”

“... study can stand by Deryck Cooke’s magisterial I saw the world end (1979) and the long essay by Michael Tanner in the Faber Wagner Companion (1979). The other three recent books are built on shakier foundations. Ewans, the author of a fine study of Janáček’s operas, here traces the allegedly strong Aeschylean influence on Wagner, while Furness and ...”

“... In March 1932​ , Thomas Mann visited Weimar in central Germany. For the last thirty years of the 18th century, this modestly sized town was home to Goethe, Schiller, Herder and Wieland, but by the 1930s it had become a hotbed of the radical right. ‘The admixture of Hitlerism and Goethe affects one strangely,’ Mann wrote in ‘Meine Goethereise ...”

“... refer to these claims. Among the novels about which she has most to say is Death in Venice. Thomas Mann was 35 when he met the original of the boy Tadzio, whose beauty prevents Aschenbach from achieving ‘Platonic sublimation’. Consequently, Mann, with his aesthetic imperative, cannot offer ‘a primarily moral account of ...”

“... still quiet – a far cry from its days as a fruit and flower nexus. I read in the Observer that Michael Caine’s father had worked in one of the London markets. Now the Market – like Caine – is gentrified, no stalls, shops or clientele operating much before 11 a.m. The figures, when we spread them out on our desk, are still below profitability, but ...”

“... 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 ...”