By any measure, Hermann Broch was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. Author of The Sleepwalkers and The Spell, he stands, together with James Joyce and Marcel Proust, at the pinnacle of literary Modernism. Born in 1886, he saw the First World War destroy the culture and consciousness of what had come before, seeing the West thrust unwillingly into the modern age. By 1938 Broch found himself arrested and detained, during...