'He had weary eyes that made it tempting to identify him with the melancholy narrators of his books, but he also had a gentle amiability and wry sense of humour.'
'Most people have an ear for the best new bits of language they come across – a better or richer or just smarter-sounding way of expressing ideas which are anyway always slightly beyond language’s grasp.'
'Revising those essays in translation I was on my own, and I kept weighing up every sentence, wondering what Max would have thought of this or that phrasing.'
Sebald deploys photographs to continually subvert his readers’ expectations. Carefully selected and laid out, he seeks, often playfully, to insert the exotic into the everyday.
'When I met Professor Sebald for our first tutorial, I was immediately struck by how different he was from the mostly aloof, self-important professors that I was used to at Munich University.'
Roger Deakin follows the swallows, David Quentin throws rocks in the sky and Robert Macfarlane lists glorious natural terms. Plus W.G. Sebald, Jay Griffiths and Rachel Lichtenstein.
Are you looking for German literature? Judith Schalansky, Jan Brandt, Peter Stamm, Demetri Martin, Paul Maliszewski, Tilman Rammstedt, Marjana Gaponenko and Anthea Bell.