Thomas Mann

Doppelgangers galore: The Novices of Lerna, by Angel Bonomini, reviewed

9 November 2024 9:00 am

A graduate from Argentina, offered a six-month fellowship in Switzerland, is appalled to meet – and have to live with - 24 versions of himself

Mysteries and misogyny: The Empusium, by Olga Tokarczuk, reviewed

21 September 2024 9:00 am

Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann’s masterpiece The Magic Mountain in this ‘health resort horror story’ set in a Silesian guesthouse on the eve of the first world war

Love in the shadow of the Nazi threat

3 June 2023 9:00 am

Florian Illies describes the charged atmosphere of Europe in the early 1930s, as people grew increasingly desperate to celebrate their last chance of freedom

The moral courage of P.J. O’Rourke

26 February 2022 9:00 am

Was it Socrates who said that chaos was the natural state of mankind, and tyranny the usual remedy? Actually it…

Mountain spa: Plombières-les-Bains

Discovering Thomas Mann by motorbike

6 October 2018 9:00 am

In Thomas Mann’s astonishing novel The Magic Mountain the indolent young Hans Castorp visits his brave, terminally ill soldier cousin…

The writer Natalie Barney and painter Romaine Brooks in Paris c. 1915

From Auden to Wilde: a roll call of gay talent

9 April 2016 9:00 am

The Comintern was the name given to the international communist network in the Soviet era, advancing the cause wherever it…

Happy early days: Erika and Klaus in 1927

Was Klaus Mann all Thomas Mann's fault?

27 February 2016 9:00 am

Thomas Mann, despite strong homosexual emotions, had six children. The two eldest, Erika and Klaus, born in 1905 and 1906…

Marlene Dietrich, George Orwell and the rebirth of a nation

20 February 2016 9:00 am

The purpose of Lara Feigel’s book is to describe the ‘political mission of reconciliation and restoration’ in the devastated cities…

You realise how little you know of anybody when they die

31 January 2015 9:00 am

Whether or not you believe in the afterlife, death remains an impenetrable mystery. One moment a person is making jokes…

When intellectuals are clueless about the first world war

1 February 2014 9:00 am

No one alive now has any adult experience of the first world war, but still it shows no sign of…

The best thing to come out of Davos

18 January 2014 9:00 am

William Cook visits the Kirchner Museum in Davos, the Alpine town where the German Expressionist found refuge and inspiration