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Quite passable up to the last, long chapter about the twentieth century, at which point the author seems overly vexed by the existence of socialism (Brecht attracts particular opprobrium here), to the point of bringing up the RAF, just to accuse them of 'left-wing Fascism' [sic]. Apart from Thomas Mann, the author appears to have little time for any twentieth-century German authors, which seems an odd choice for an OUP VSI book.

To my surprise, I like the older translation better. The newer one feels a bit bland, and over-explainy (e.g. I don't actually need to know the specific phonology of the "Hamburg accent" Mann refers to, and describing that doesn't make much sense when I'm not reading the dialogue in German). I should probably add the other translation as its own book and switch over to it.

Meanwhile, I was very amused yesterday to learn that this story of a man who thinks he's going to a sanatorium for three weeks and ends up there for seven years was originally conceived as a novella, and in the end it took Mann 12 years to write the 750-page doorstopper. Life imitating art imitating life and so on.