Mann has not lacked biographers, but for years it was hardly possible to write openly and uninhibitedly about his homosexuality - although it is an inescapable factor in his books, from Death in Venice onwards. He married and had six children, some of them remarkable people in their own right, yet always hungered after handsome young men (the inspiration for the figure of Felix Krull came from a young waiter who served Mann at table in his old age). His patrician North German background and later move to Munich, the Nazi years and the long exile in America, are familiar territory by now; but while there has been a wave of debunking in the last two decades - partly in reaction against the idealised public portrait of Mann in the immediate postwar years - Heilbut shows a man who did not lack intellectual courage and, while proud of his literary success, was ready to court unpopularity when it became necessary to defend his convictions in public.