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“... exist is to a large extent a world formed by Marx and Nietzsche.’ And some three decades later Albert Camus wrote: ‘In the history of the intelligence, with the exception of Marx, Nietzsche’s adventure has no equivalent; we shall never finish making reparation for the injustice done to him.’ Marx and Nietzsche: an odd but historically correct ...”

“... only to Fanon’s book, but to Léopold Sédar Senghor’s anthology of Négritude poets and to Albert Memmi’s Portrait of the Coloniser. ‘Your influence in this region is deeper and wider than that of any other writer,’ the Egyptian writer Ahmad ‘Abbas Salih told him. Fanon, alert to the transformation that had caused Sartre to replace the abstract ...”

“... de Saint-Exupéry, as well as launching the careers of Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Blanchot and Albert Camus. (He gave Camus a job that made it possible for him to live in Paris, and published L’Etranger in May 1942, followed by Le Mythe de Sisyphe, though a section on Kafka was removed on the advice of the ...”

“... me of my frigidity or to satisfy my ghoulish appetites.’ The Vatican put the book on the Index; Albert Camus accused her of having made the French male look ridiculous. When The Second Sex was published in the US in the spring of 1953, it leaped onto the the bestseller lists. It has sold well ever since. In the 1950s, it was the only book women who ...”

“... The heroes of Albert Camus’s books can be quite annoying: surly, self-dramatising Hamlets who like to think of themselves as strong, silent loners, wise to human folly. But although they are often arrogant, self-absorbed and predictable, they are also susceptible to the weather, and happy to be upstaged by unseasonable storms, torpid nights, fierce sunlight, or the chance of a swim in the limpid sea ...”

“... family on an outing to Tipasa, whose Roman ruins by the Mediterranean were so beloved of the young Albert Camus. Among the stones and trees near the sea’s edge, in the warm salt light, was a memorial stone with an inscription quoting the writer: ‘Je comprends ici ce qu’on appelle gloire, le droit d’aimer sans mesure.’ ...”

“... since​ the arrival of Covid-19 – in Western Europe, roughly at the end of January – sales of Albert Camus’s The Plague, first published in 1947, have increased exponentially, an upsurge strangely in line with the graphs that daily chart the toll of the sick and the dead. By the end of March, monthly sales of the UK Penguin Classics edition had ...”

“... Dionysus was the Crucified.’ To adopt the words of another prophet of the modern European mind, Albert Camus, Nietzsche finds the only Christ we deserve. Nietzsche, whose god, you will recall, died, needed a special resurrection; he needed, so to speak, a Christ with an altered physiognomy: And what rough beast, its hour come round ...”

“... school, I was only ten, my most vivid memory of that time not any examination but that my friend Albert Benson, who was regularly top of the class, wasn’t going on to the high school because he would have to go out to work at the earliest opportunity. Ironically, of those taking part the one whose experience is closest to mine is Kenneth Clarke. Like me he ...”

“... patiently, we led him to the room he would never leave again.’ While the style is influenced by Camus, the scene is not. When Meursault shoots the Arab on the beach, we learn about Meursault’s sensations, about the heat and the blinding sun. Camus is interested in Meursault, not in his victim. Duras forces us to witness ...”

“... a lie, as the world was for Wilfred Owen, and not a new-found absurdity as it was for Sartre and Camus. It is a place where lying and absurdity are the plausible norm and manage to sound, to all but the most satirical minds, like truth and reason. They sound like honour and service and sacrifice and virtue, monuments of logic, and even cashing in is ...”

“... all in old movies, these reluctant action heroes became perfect modern exemplars for the likes of Camus, who saw in them a stoic refusal to be held back by the status quo. Men who behaved as if there was a point in trying to right wrongs, even if they knew the world better than that. Mostly, in the early 1960s, we sat passively in the dark, in oversized black ...”

“... He asked me which writers I was reading. I told him Nathanael West, Emily Dickinson, Camus. He said he didn’t think much of any of them. He advocated the work of Thomas Mann, Chekhov, Proust, Trollope, Dickens, Shakespeare and certain Latin poets (Martial, Horace). Of the King James version of the Bible, he said: ‘It’s frightfully ...”

“... Nietzsche. Quoting himself from an earlier incarnation, he writes in a synthesis of the worst of Camus and the worst of Sartre: The advanced world may well be like, and feel like, a closed and guarded palace, in a city gripped by the plague. There is another metaphor, developed by André Gide, one of the many powerful minds powerfully influenced by ...”

“... as easily have deserted.’ The inconclusiveness of the story is present from the outset.Charles-Albert Cingria’s prose walkabout, ‘The Grass Snake’, is a comparable feat. Its subject is a water snake that lives under a large flat stone near a lakeside castle, and is a much loved local personality, though a figure of naked terror to unsuspecting ...”