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“... the context of a disastrous interview that Darrieussecq conducted with the former Prime Minister, Alain Juppé. She agreed to talk to Juppé for Elle, but did not get to read the final edit, where they cut out her questions about ‘la crise sociale’ and industrial unrest, leaving only low-calorie chat about his jogging and reading ...”

“... novels of more or less the same period, when adolescence became a subject for fiction-writers: for Alain-Fournier in Le Grand Meaulnes, for Alec Waugh in The Loom of Youth, for Thomas Mann in ‘Tonio Kröger’. Szerb’s group centres on a charismatic brother and sister, Tamás and Eva Ulpius, who live in unstructured bohemian chaos with their father, a ...”

“... being’. She found the funeral more troubling still. Organised by Judith and her husband, Jacques-Alain Miller, Lacan’s editor and disciple, it was a private affair for ‘intimate friends’ – mostly acolytes of l’École de la Cause freudienne – with Thibaut and Sibylle cast as ‘undesirables’. ‘The postmortem appropriation of Lacan, of our ...”

“... and Ornella Muti as a rounded Odette – a movie redeemed in part by the elegant performance of Alain Delon as Charlus. Even in this climate, however, we may not be entirely prepared for the comic-strip version of A la recherche (the first few frames from which are reproduced on page 10). Certainly the French weren’t, as Alan Riding’s recent report in ...”

“... prerogative in Argentina – which didn’t help her either. The final straw must have come when Alain Robbe-Grillet, in Buenos Aires in 1962 to attend a Pen Club meeting and ‘taken on the “de rigueur” visit to Villa Ocampo’, was said to have observed that the place reminded him of a brothel. There is something strikingly apt in the idea of Ocampo as ...”

“... on the kitchen table and its blood-soaked face – even with both eyes scooped out and a pair of Alain Mikli sunglasses over the holes – looks like it’s frowning. I get very tired looking at it. Pasolini’s horrific film Salò – to which I would not be surprised to learn Ellis owed a debt of inspiration – comes to mind more than once while reading ...”

“... to paint a scene of maritime disaster at precisely the time when shipwrecks were in fashion. (Alain Corbin’s Le Territoire du vide might have provided some cultural perspective here: he describes Restoration tourists at seaside resorts deriving emotional pleasure from ‘the curious and gripping spectacle’ of shipwreck victims drowning within sight of ...”

“... which have passed many men of account in the social sciences in France: Aron, Lévi-Strauss, Alain Touraine, Pierre Bourdieu, Serge Moscovici ... In French, what is more, we do not talk of the ‘social sciences’ so much as the ‘human sciences’, which, simply on the lexical plane, establishes a bridge between the young sociology (for example) and ...”

“... glance at what Robert Zaretsky in his critical study calls Camus’s ‘serial infidelities’ and Alain Vircondelet in his new biography refers to as ‘donjuanisme’; but if so this is her only glance, apart from a mention of Camus’s ‘relation intime’ with the actress Maria Casarès. Vircondelet, less discreet and more worldly, suggests everything was ...”

“... experiments had a far-reaching influence on 20th-century literature: from the nouveau roman (both Alain Robbe-Grillet and Michel Butor wrote early appreciations of Roussel) to the monthly meetings of the Oulipo collective, to Jean Echenoz’s pastiche genre novel Lac (which unwinds its espionage caper from the point at which flies, les mouches, become ...”

“... of ordinary people and reduced the shape and size of France to manageable proportions. He links Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, published in 1913, to ‘the rapid disappearance of undiscovered France, and the desire to believe that it still existed’. The ‘lost domain’ that haunts the novel’s hero is emblematic of la France profonde as a ...”

“... of parents, children, siblings, spouses. The effect here is similar, in a muted way, to that of Alain Resnais’s film Night and Fog, where we can’t put together the bland colour images of the present with the grisly black and white pictures of the past. What on earth can it mean to say this is the same place? At another moment the narrator recalls a film ...”

“... thought from Mallarmé’s aesthetics and Sartre’s nothingness to Derrida’s différance and Alain Badiou’s ineffable Event. Jameson tells us that he adheres provisionally to all the theoretical cases he outlines, which ignores not only the flagrant contradictions between them but the incompatibility of some of them with his own Marxist politics. It is ...”

“... of Proustian re-evaluations, including film adaptations from Raoul Ruiz and Chantal Ackerman, Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life, Malcolm Bowie’s Proust among the Stars and Harold Pinter’s stage version at the National Theatre. Rose has long been preoccupied with the power of fantasy – ‘perverse, recalcitrant, persistent’, as ...”

“... it of stagnation in the 15th century without seeing – even from documents under his eyes: Alain Chartier, for instance – that the genre was learning, in post-Agincourt France, to depict the ‘despair’ which Huizinga (in accord with his poets) makes its dominant mood. The list of charges is easily extended, through the subjects Huizinga touches ...”