Perhaps born a little too soon after his immediately elder sister – “My grandmother was still tired front the earlier birth,” Maria suggested to me, “and my father was born tired” – he had a punctured lung and was in consequence a frail child. (The morbidly alert Aschenbach, noting that Tadzio’s teeth are “imperfect, rather jagged and bluish, and without a healthy glaze”, conjectures with a hint of gleeful ghoulishness that “he will most likely not live to grow old”.) So he alone of the family was allowed to sleep himself out in the morning and breakfast when it pleased him. It was, in fact, on account of that hole in his lung, and the recommendation of a Viennese specialist whom his parents had consulted that what the boy needed most was sea breezes and the company of playmates his own age, that the Moeses elected to summer in Venice (a remarkably perverse choice given the city’s unsanitary reputation).Nor, it transpires, was Thomas Mann the first writer to fall victim to his prepubescent winsomeness. At the wedding of one of his aunts – for which, as a gar? d’honneur, he was turned out in lace of a fetchingly creamy blanc d’ivoire – the six-year-old Adzio caught the eye of Henryk Sienkiewicz, the once world-famous, now world-forgotten, Nobel Prize-winning author of the much-filmed pseudo-classical romance Quo Vadis? Leaving the church in his landau, the doting Sienkiewicz insisted that the infant come perch upon his knees, only hurriedly to offload him when he discovered that this Tiepolesque seraph had peed down the leg of his morning-suit.Adzio was not at all unresponsive to the privileges of beauty and, from an early age, became accustomed to being a focus of attention. During the Venetian holiday, he would strike up an acquaintance with fruit and flower vendors and inveigle them into slipping him a peach, a plum or a cluster of ripe strawberries.

If they refused (which, in any event, they seldom did), he would tease them with foot-stamping squeals of “Cattiva! Cattiva!” Unusually, the local fishermen were permitted by his family to take him out unchaperoned on their boats. And he himself would court, as though he regarded it as no more than his rightful homage, all the petting and fondling that he came in for.He had discovered, for example, probably from his mother’s precedent, the gratifying effect of delaying one’s appearance in a public place; and he told Maria how eager he had been, one evening in the Hotel des Bains, to show off to the company a pair of shiny new shoes of which he was immoderately vain He held back until the other guests had taken their seats. Then, with his clustering blond ringlets and water-blue eyes, he all but goose-stepped down the grand central staircase into the dining room (just like the very young Thomas Mann himself, as it happens, who would strut through the streets of his home town, Lubeck, hoping to be mistaken for the Kaiser), so intense was his resolve that no one would fail to remark on how splendidly he was shod “Did everyone see me?” he excitedly questioned his nurse “Was everyone watching?”Someone certainly was. In his later years Adzio vividly recalled an “old man” (Mann, remember, was 36-year-old) staring at him wherever he went, hovering always just out of sight as the Moeses ambled through the city’s fabled Piranesian labyrinth of tourist-worn streets and dark, sunless alleys and stairways and arches and columns and those archetypal Venetian squares.He was, he recalled, at the receiving end of an especially intent gaze from his admirer when they had occasion to take the hotel lift together, an incident replicated to the last degree in both novella and film, the latter of which was widely, but perhaps unjustly, criticised for portraying a Tadzio too coquettishly self-conscious of Aschenbach’s attentions. “It’s just another gentleman who likes me,” he would assure his nurse, and no one in those innocent, halcyon Edwardian days appears to have thought it worth advising him to steer altogether clear of “old men”, particularly those still in their 30s.Yet even if his mother would repeatedly tell him, “Yes, you’re good-looking, but it isn’t you who have made yourself so – so there’s no reason for you to be so proud of it”, Wladyslaw Moes remained something of a dandy to the end of his life, no mean achievement in Communist Poland. Maria (who rejects the word “dandy” for her father, preferring to qualify his unflamboyantly classical elegance with such adjectives as “immaculate” and “impeccable”) remembers him paying her a visit in Paris in 1980.

“He was then 80 years old and his life had not been an easy one. Because of inoperable cataracts, his eyesight had started to fail. But whenever we prepared to go out he would have to know that he looked just right and, as he was no longer able to check for himself, he would ask me if his shirt collar was clean and his tie straight. It was important for hint to have the ‘look’ he had always cultivated for himself.”This is an extract from The Real Tadzio by Gilbert Adair, published by the Short Book Company. Please call 01256 302 699 and quote GLR code 039 for a special price of £4.99, including p&p. People want philosophy to be enlightening about matters of importance which affect their lives.

It is partly from a sense that philosophy is practically irrelevant, unintelligible or both that non-philosophers have ignored it, and scrupulous philosophers have sometimes become disenchanted with it. The impression of the uselessness of philosophy has been compounded by academic philosophers who write as if philosophy were a form of intellectual limbo-dancing rather than a variant of an activity in which we are all involved: the attempt to determine how best to live. Buy The Meaning of ThingsBuy Being Good   People want philosophy to be enlightening about matters of importance which affect their lives. His work appears to have released an urge among professional philosophers to address a more general public The enterprise represented by these books is admirable.