″Even highly educated people can adjust to unreason and violence″
n 1950, The New Yorker magazine reviewed an anthology by the German novelist and Nobel laureate Thomas Mann, then at the summit of his fame and living in exile in the US. The book, it said, gave the impression of “a major writer – but perhaps not all major”. Mann, needless to say, was phlegmatic – as well he might have been, being the world’s most famous novelist. But the review carried the suggestion that he