Stefan Zweig
How to write a piano concerto
My Piano Concerto, The World of Yesterday, began with an email during one of the darker days of the pandemic:…
The beauty and tedium of the works of Adalbert Stifter
The 19th-century Austrian was an astonishingly pure stylist, as W.G. Sebald acknowledges – but it takes real dedication to craft to write such boring novels
Vapid and pretentious: Visit From An Unknown Woman, at Hampstead Theatre, reviewed
Visit From An Unknown Woman, adapted by Christopher Hampton from a short story by Stefan Zweig, opens like an episode…
His own worst enemy
The Radetzky March must be one of the dozen greatest European novels – but its author was frighteningly unpleasant, says Philip Hensher
Lend me your ears
Don’t read James Joyce’s Ulysses, says John Phipps. Listen to it
The real deal – or not
One of the stranger things that happened in the period just before lockdown was the sudden disappearance of audiences from…
Hitler’s émigrés
German-speaking refugees dragged British culture into the 20th century. But that didn’t go down well in Stepney or Stevenage, says William Cook
Pessimism keeps breaking in
State-of-criticism overviews and assessments almost always strike a bleak note —the critical mind naturally angles towards pessimism — so it…
The wandering Jew
Stefan Zweig wasn’t, to be honest, a very good writer. This delicious fact was hugged to themselves by most of…
For your eyes only
The Grand Budapest Hotel is the latest Wes Anderson film and it is beautiful to look at, scrumptious, luscious, such…
The game of consequences
No one alive now has any adult experience of the first world war, but still it shows no sign of…
