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“... all Petrarch’s works – even, or perhaps especially, the most autobiographical ones – makes Mann an agnostic on questions of fact where Petrarch is our sole witness. He is non-committal on whether Laura really existed; whether the celebrated ascent of Mont Ventoux ever took place; even, it seems, whether Petrarch was crowned poet laureate on the ...”

“... terms. ‘There is no plan by the university to break any trusts,’ Davies and the dean of SAS, Nicholas Mann, stated in 2007. This sounded reassuring, but it emerged in the recent court proceedings that no one in the university bothered to show the trust deed even to their in-house legal adviser until the summer of 2008. Up to that time the university ...”

“... was born on Christmas Day, 1899. Lauren Bacall died on 12 August 2014. So the span of William Mann’s well-researched dual biography is some 115 years. But a case can be made that the ‘greatest love affair’ promised by Mann amounted to no more than 216 minutes in the busy years of the mid-1940s. That’s the ...”

“... for all Jünger’s intelligence, from a conceptual currency debased by moral idiocy. According to Nicholas Boyle in his Foreword to The Dear Purchase, when this monograph appeared one of Stern’s older colleagues told him: ‘If you want to get on, do not write this sort of thing again.’ Stern, Boyle adds, ‘was incensed. He continued writing, and, in ...”

“... a great deal of time and energy generating anecdotes about himself,’ his colleague Murray Gell-Mann announced at Feynman’s memorial service, firmly flouting the nil nisi bonum convention. Feynman was also, among other things, a jerk. At his father’s funeral, he refused to recite the Kaddish, making his mother break down and cry. He seduced and ...”

“... later call, applying the term to a very different kind of music, ‘entartete Kunst’. Thomas Mann was to satirise this attitude in Buddenbrooks, where Edmund Pfühl, the local organist, refuses to play excerpts from Tristan because of the music’s immorality: ‘I cannot play that, my dear lady!’ he says to Gerda, ‘I am your most devoted servant but ...”

“... of Hacking’s ‘casual visitor’. When Martin Weitzman, who along with Robert Pindyck and Nicholas Stern has done more than anyone to get mainstream economics to take catastrophe seriously, said that all his work points towards a ‘generalised precautionary principle’, he was saying that we, as a species, cannot afford to use the Coke machine ...”

“... as a Stoic painter, practising the virtues of restraint and discretion they recommended. Richard Mann’s study of El Greco’s patrons is highly appropriate to a new series of monographs on art history of which the editors are Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny. It is the author’s first book, a revised version of a ...”

“... the city and his death there, and his significance for d’Annunzio, Barrès, Nietzsche and Thomas Mann, before stepping back to the success of Verdi’s Otello with its libretto by Camillo Boito’s brother, Arrigo. All of this occupies a fairly small section in the middle of her book. Lovers of the city may find something she has missed (I regret that there ...”

“... minutiae as though the future of civilisation depended on it. There’s a long letter to William Mann taking him to task for his misconception of the umlaut; and, in the LRB archive, a hilarious correspondence, from the early 1980s, between Keller and the editors, about the distinction between the colon and the semi-colon, the use of the dash, the different ...”

“... of course, be furnished: C. Day Lewis was free to write detective fiction under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake and so not soil the reputation of the serious poet. Pseudonymy is essentially a disguise, a device for throwing readers off the scent. For absolute security’s sake the choice of assumed name should be arbitrary and inscrutable. In some ...”

“... 1918. No one knows war is coming, and with it the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire itself. As Nicholas Spice said, writing about the novel a year and a half or so ago (LRB, 16 October 1997), it is part of its genius to make us almost forget the catastrophe which hangs over it. ‘Almost but not quite: we experience the unreal and troubled somnolence of ...”

“... meaning ‘pottery jar’. The translation – an excellent one – is the work of Dr Margaret Mann Phillips (whose first book on the Adages appeared some twenty years ago and was received with enthusiasm). Help with the translation is given by an impressive team. The only slight regret is that the translation of the proverbs themselves is not always ...”

“... Marx, Vincente Minnelli, Gregory Peck, Vincent Price, Robert Ryan, Edward G. Robinson, Donna Reed, Nicholas Ray, Robert Siodmak, Frank Sinatra, Sylvia Sidney, Claire Trevor, Franchot Tone, Walter Wanger, Keenan Wynn, William Wyler, Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, Jerry Wald and Robert Young. Ronald Reagan, a New Deal Democrat at the time (and an FBI informant ...”

“... vulgar as gravure advertisements for kitchenware. It is worth emphasising how far Penn, Anthony Mann, Fuller, Nicholas Ray and Peckinpah have disproved those rosy, statuesque images. Could Ford match the harrowing historical perspective of Little Big Man, the moral ambiguity of The Far Country, the painful violence of Run ...”