Any writer who could handle all these different voices would deserve high praise, but to do so without any sense of jarring or incoherence is an extraordinary accomplishment.

I read Aschenbach's constant desire to go beyond the works he has already produced to be the counterpart of Mann's deep wish to surpass his previous fiction; sometimes the diaries express this in terms of a dejected judgment that the summit has already been reached.

So this is my attempt to give a preliminary - probably far too crude - account of how philosophy by showing can really teach us. The attempts we make to work through problems by reasoning always presuppose starting points, and even the most self-critical philosophers adopt some of those starting points simply by picking them up from the social environments in which they grow up.

I'm a pluralist about perspectives on literature. There seem to me to be all sorts of illuminating ways of responding to major literary works, some of them paying considerable attention to context, others applying various theoretical ideas, yet others focusing on details of language, or linking the work to the author's life, or connecting it with other works.

I'm often quite gloomy about the prospects for the human future. But, although I have no competence to intervene directly in a political movement, I hope that what I write may, in combination with the suggestions of others, cause a shift in perspective that will inspire a world-wide movement to accept the only solution to climate change. And before it's too late.

Current education in science treats all students as if they were going to have scientific careers. They are required to solve problems and memorize lists. For many of them, this kills interest very quickly.

After the success of Buddenbrooks, he married and fathered six children. Yet the surviving diaries tell us of recurrent sexual problems - and of Katia Mann's extremely sympathetic response to them