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“... At the time of Vichy, Robbe-Grillet was in Paris at the National Institute of Agronomy (which Michel Houellebecq, who found his work ‘indigestible’, would attend).* Unable to return to Brest, he ended up in Nuremberg as a forced labourer assembling Panzer tanks. He had never questioned his parents’ support for Pétain and found the war a ...”

“... this is what lays claim to philosophy, literature is not far behind. Today’s leading novelist, Michel Houellebecq – the ‘Baudelaire of the supermarket’ in the eyes of admirers – occupies a position not unlike that of Martin Amis in English letters, as the writer by whom readers most like to be shocked, though beyond the commonplaces of sex and ...”

“... sand.’ The novel is not without flaws. A note of male self-pity creeps in here and there, as in Michel Houellebecq’s fiction: it is tiresome to be told yet again about the dreadful ache men feel in their forties because hot young girls are no longer interested in them. (But at least St Aubyn, unlike ...”

“... to, what its ground rules should be – so much so that some have found their legacy stifling. Michel Houellebecq’s response has been one of adolescent rejection, or, to use the type of psychological language that the nouveaux romanciers so splendidly shun, denial: writing in Artforum in 2008, he claimed never to have finished a Robbe-Grillet ...”