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“... writing, or at least from the writing he was supposed to be doing. In fact, he was leading what Reiner Stach calls ‘a double, and even a triple life’, hanging out with the villagers, writing letters to his friends and recording reflections in large notebooks. One of Kafka’s diary entries, written three days after he arrived in Zürau, treated his ...”

“... the enemy lines. What constitutes the life of Kafka, at least the enduringly legible parts of it? Reiner Stach has written a chronological biography of nearly two thousand pages, all three volumes of which are out in German, with the second and third already translated into English by Shelley Frisch. (The first volume, covering Kafka’s youth, was ...”

“... to handle 15 cheap Parker pens.’Children are mostly wrong, but also superior to us. Reading Reiner Stach’s Kafka: The Early Years, I found myself thinking often of Sendak. Maybe this is only because I read too many children’s books too many times, and such rereading makes Kabbalah from anything. Or maybe, more tendentiously, because Sendak and ...”

“... an Olympic swimming medal when you can’t even swim. ‘A great swimmer,’ Kafka’s biographer Reiner Stach says, ‘in Kafka’s imagery was a term of the highest regard.’ And terms of the highest regard are – for Kafka as for Freud – always ironised. We are always left out, especially when we seem to be included. ‘There is hope,’ Kafka ...”

“... thousand pages. Kafka, who barely reached the age of forty, yielded only five hundred fewer from Reiner Stach. Proust, expiring at 51, got just under a thousand apiece from Jean-Yves Tadié and William Carter; Joyce, at 59, eight hundred from Richard Ellmann. Moving down the scale to medium or lightweights, there is little reduction in size. If we ...”