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“... At the beginning of the third volume of his autobiography, Elias Canetti is still in his twenties. He has been cooped up for a year in a bed-sitter on the outskirts of Vienna with only a print of the Isenheim altar as company, working on the grim novel that was eventually to be called Auto da Fé. Early one morning he catches the first workman’s train into town, dashes through empty streets and lets himself into the apartment of his loved one, later his wife, Veza – she has given him a latchkey against such an eventuality ...”

“... Leonard Kauders (based on Franz Baermann Steiner) and Oswald and Inge Bergmann (based on Elias and Veza Canetti) refer him to a philanthropist who doesn’t offer any money, just a job at a wallpaper factory. Arthur is going broke for writing a book about deception, self-deception and persecution, while professional Marxists brand him a schnorrer and ...”

“... would be gratified by the retrospective confirmation of their theses in autobiographies. Elias Canetti, born in Bulgaria, was even less of Vienna than those who were Habsburg citizens. But when he arrived there at the age of 19 he soon acclimatised: ‘The young people I associated with hadn’t been to war. But they all attended Karl Kraus’s lectures ...”