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“... in wilful collective hallucination, the abbey and its visitors mostly ignore them. As Robert Musil said, writing before BLM, ‘there is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument.’ The abbey’s audio guide – the English version is mellifluously narrated by Jeremy Irons – mentions them only in brief asides about Poets’ Corner ...”

“... veritable exhortation to the revolutionary renewal for which the prewar avant-garde had striven. Robert Graves would later write of the ‘duty to run mad’ unleashed by the experience of the trenches. Nijinsky wasn’t in the trenches, but millions of his broken bodies were, and when he stepped before his final audience at the hotel in Switzerland, he was ...”

“... linguistic innovation, what Kurt Tucholsky called its ‘atmosphere of unwashed feet’ and Robert Musil praised as its ‘human smell’. Fallada revels in the use of such practically untranslatable North German idioms as sich einen hinter die Binde giessen (‘to pour yourself one behind the bandages’, meaning ‘to get drunk’), Leute in den ...”

“... room. ‘How,’ he wrote on 29 March, to make a large novel centripetal instead of centrifugal? Musil does it with the character of Ulrich who, by being uncommitted to anything, acts as the touchstone to all the committed characters around him – yet Ulrich isn’t a cipher as Hans Castorp tends to be. This is a very subtle piece of organisation. Another ...”

“... is a forbidden transgression that is also a universal fact. He draws a transgressive moral from Robert Musil: ‘The many sexual combinations exhibited in The Man without Qualities testify to the great truth that all knowledge of the other, all intercourse between opposites, is analogous to carnal knowledge. It is an idea ready for political ...”

“... or about memory or time. But obviously he doesn’t mean just to disappoint, any more than Musil did when he said of his own much more laborious novel: ‘the story of this novel amounts to the fact that the story which should be narrated in it is not narrated.’ Many other writers – Eliot and Pasternak, for instance – who clearly are concerned ...”

“... so ‘hysterically discreet’ that he got married by proxy; who, in the words of the writer Robert Neumann, ‘spent his life on the run. From the Great War to Switzerland. From the symbolic firing-squad across the Channel. From Blitzed London to the safety of provincial Bath. From Hitler’s threatened invasion of England to the USA. From Roosevelt’s ...”

“... been murdered in the camps found it hard to speak about their loss. In Germany, the 1964 trial of Robert Mulka – former adjutant to Commandant Rudolf Höss – and 21 others for crimes committed at Auschwitz enabled a new generation to confront the past, but in Britain and the United States it was only some years later that it became possible to broach the ...”

“... his friend observed, desire to beauty and that his real obsession, like that of his contemporary Musil, was uniting the two by the same aesthetic. How he must have responded to Ruskin’s comment, in The Stones of Venice, that it was just as exciting to study the little green crabs in the weed on the mooring stage as it was to disembark and enjoy the Titians ...”

“... At the beginning of Robert Musil’s Man without Qualities a well-dressed couple arrives at the scene of an accident on a busy street in Vienna. The lady is uncomfortable, ‘had a disagreeable sensation in the pit of her stomach, which she felt entitled to take for compassion’. The man, after a pause, says: ‘These heavy lorries they use here have too long a braking-distance ...”

“... finding good translations, and perhaps also because the generation he influenced – Gide, Kafka, Musil, Lawrence, Bely – superseded him by smoothly manufacturing his inventions as if they were not inventions. Yet his Fascism must partly explain his contemporary eclipse. It drained, and almost abolished, his name while he was still alive. One can trace the ...”

“... Schorske’s authoritative Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (1980), the book which, along with memories of Musil and Kraus, Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal, Klimt and above all Freud, has formed whatever imprecise notions we may have of that time and place. Wolff is mainly interested in two cases involving children abused till they died. These were reported in the ...”

“... sort of affair, quite often fails to live up to our expectations of it, as when it allowed Robert Maxwell to slip quietly into the ocean rather than ending up in the dock. Austen or Dickens would never have tolerated such a botched finale. For the Lukácsian case about realism, technique is an optional extra, like having a stereo or a sunroof in your ...”

“... it was nonetheless their duty and vocation to represent. The great moderns – Mallarmé, Joyce, Musil et al – achieved this impossible and double-binding imperative by representing their inability to represent. They earned their right to sublimity by using ‘picture-thinking’ against itself, and for them failure was success. The postmoderns seem to ...”

“... Yet even among modern masters there is little consistency. James died in his early seventies, Musil in his early sixties: Leon Edel and Karl Corino awarded them each two 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 ...”