A friend said recently that the only two people he knew who had read Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers were David Malouf, who died in April and your columnist. It’s a pity that few people decide to climb this latter-day magic mountain given the intrinsic appeal of the Joseph story, which is conveyed so economically and lightly in the Andrew Lloyd Webber/ Tim Rice musical Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and indeed in the fifteen pages or so of the Bible account. This is best experienced in the rhythms of the King James translators, who bring out the poignancy of the beautiful boy with the coat of many colours who provokes such resentment on the part of his brothers even though he comes, in time, to be the high and mighty executive of all Egypt.

The Joseph story is one of the most attractive in the Hebrew Bible, not least because it is full of the spirit of forgiveness and points to a period where a great Hebrew man could provide for the Egyptians in plenty and in famine. There’s something intensely moving about the way Thomas Mann, who loathed the Nazis, could finish his Joseph sequence in sun-drenched California during the presidency of Roosevelt, who had ensured that the New Deal would work, though some of his patrician confrères accused him of being a class traitor.

We sometimes forget the High German culture which was brought to America and had such a dazzling effect there. Einstein warned FDR about nuclear weapons, which led to the atom bomb and Oppenheimer saying, in horrified recognition of his role in its making, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’. He could read the Bhagavad Gita in the original Sanskrit, just as he read Proust in French.

The difficulty with Thomas Mann, who is paradoxically the greatest master of narrative among the high modernists, is the elaborate, deliberately archaic and parodistic style of his original translator, Helen Lowe-Porter. Her effort to find an English equivalent to Mann’s German is extraordinary. We are a bit inclined to think the upshot is mannered beyond belief, but this is in fact unfair to the woman who not only owned a Cézanne but was infinitely and sedulously sensitive to the different strands of linguistic reference she sought to reproduce, not only in the Joseph tetralogy but in Doktor Faustus, which connects the hero’s dark designs with Schoenberg’s atonal endeavours in music. We know old Reformation German evokes the German of Luther, but Helen Lowe-Porter is not willing to translate this in approximate biblical English. She digs further back into the language of Tyndale, who is generally reckoned the greatest translator of the Bible.

It’s hard not to be grateful to Helen Lowe-Porter for this sensitivity to what Mann calls ‘the well of the past’.

That magnetic critic Susan Sontag was terribly underwhelmed as a teenager when she met Thomas Mann and imagined she was meeting a dull literary eminence.

Simon Gray was certainly not that. His Smoking Diaries have an extraordinary dramatic intensity which consistently takes the reader by surprise and has him shrieking with laughter when it becomes clear that the villain who has disrupted the show with blatant self-destructive idiocy is in fact the author.

We watched Quartermaine’s Terms, the 1987 television version, on YouTube. It’s set in what looks like a small Cambridge college but is in fact a language school with a cohort of Japanese students. The college is run by John Gielgud, who is incurably dapper and bland. The cast includes Eleanor Bron as a woman who has to care for a mother who reviles her, half of whose face is paralysed so that she has the self-mocking appearance of a gangster talking out of the side of his mouth: the play toys deliberately with the open invitation to murder mother. There is a northern oik who hungers for more work and is accident-prone. And through all these there is the likeable, super-considerate figure of Edward Fox, who is forever buying tickets to The Cherry Orchard or Ghosts or something that no one is interested in accompanying him to. He is worth the lot of them, but he is ultimately thrown to the wolves after the death of Gielgud’s partner.

Fox gives a heartbreakingly fine performance in which he is destroyed because his classes are shorter than anyone else’s. Simon Gray’s script is a splendid combination of absurdism and realism. Gray transforms the potential cruelty with a consummate depiction of the all-too-believable faces of a bunch of self-centred figures who are indifferent to the fact that Fox is going to be destroyed.

Quartermaine’s Terms is a kind of Passion play in which Edward Fox is killed on behalf of a religion of ruthlessness. It is a surging, beautifully poised exercise in murder which will have any viewer on the edge of her seat even as she chuckles in her complicity. Gray had a fluent, resonant gift that really does bring to mind Shakespeare’s exorbitant talent. The Rear Column, directed for television by Harold Pinter, is set in the Victorian-era Congo at a British army post nominally under the charge of Stanley (of Livingstone fame). It is a society where people run the risk of dying for the lack of quinine, and where blacks are literally flogged to death. Barry Foster plays the commanding officer with a sort of demented charisma, and Simon Ward is characteristic in his combination of boyishness and his assimilation to a man’s world full of cruelty and horrors gradually – almost rationally – absorbed. Pinter directs with a brilliant sense of overlapping but distinctive male voices.

After it we watched Pinter interviewed by Charlie Rose. He oscillated – dazzlingly – between diatribes against America and Nato and appeals to his interviewer of such naked charm and seductiveness that you felt you were in the presence of one of the great ones who shape the earth. Pinter, in July 2001 when the interview was done, could flick a switch that made him seem a boyish delight.

No wonder he adored the writing of Simon Gray.