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“... On the one hand, their histories abound with individuals, Havelock Ellis, Stella Browne, even the Marquis deSade, who realised that their scripts no longer fitted what their bodies seemed to know, and who proved capable of finding new speech for their experience, at once highly personal and resonant to others. On the ...”

“... of the crowd’, and with the Revolution sparagmos appears on the streets of Paris. Now enters the Marquis deSade, with whom the exercise of ritual male violence ‘approximates to sacrifice’. Kleist and Flaubert, Swinburne and Sacher-Masoch continued the work of separating sacrifice from happy endings and also from ...”

“... others of similar provenance) with a smooth white limestone egg, found near the château of the Marquis deSade. A hidden ox heart completed the work. In terms of literary reference, it was already too much: the metaphor tears itself apart. But the thing itself, the exhibited object, achieves a precarious ...”

“... Don Alfonso as both a mature libertine – ‘an understated version of his near contemporary the Marquis deSade’ – and at the same time as a sort of moral tutor to the two young men. Said points out that Alfonso is ‘only the second authority figure’ in Mozart’s operas ‘to appear after the death of ...”

“... Disraeli, and time, especially, to discover the deeply intellectualist conservatism of the third Marquis of Salisbury, whose record as the most electorally successful Conservative prime minister seems likely to be snatched by Mrs Thatcher. The invocation, usually at Party Conferences, of something called ‘Disraelian Conservatism’ continues, despite this ...”

“... du Plessix Gray, whom they met last night. She is writing a ‘domestic biography’ of the Marquis deSade. Apparently she did not seem interested in ‘post-sexual women’, a subject about which she wrote in the recent New Yorker Women’s Issue (Judith borrowed my copy in order to ask her about it) but ...”

“... a daughter of the Princess Lubomirska, the intimate friend of Marie-Antoinette and the Princesse de Lamballe, he had a foot in extreme anti-Revolution circles. Lubomirska’s palace at Lancut in Galicia was a famous sanctuary for royalist refugees, among them the future Louis XVIII and Charles X, and in August 1792, the month of the massacre at the ...”

“... The literary career of Isidore Ducasse, successor to Sade, Byron and Baudelaire and a model for Rimbaud, Jarry and the Surrealists, has been virtually a posthumous one. It has been chronically complicated furthermore by obsessions with the lacunae of his biography, as well as with the interpretation of the two names, Lautréamont and Maldoror, the first of which is a mystery and the second an enigma ...”

“... but beyond a certain facile misanthropy his writing is notably bereft of ideas. He is certainly no Marquis deSade, who genuinely was a philosopher. His so-called nihilism is just the flipside of his hedonism, which plunders the world of meaning and value by reducing it to raw material for self-gratification. Larman ...”

“... only nine when Dante first saw her, whereas Petrarch’s fateful encounter with Laura is a coup de foudre which certainly includes sexual desire, variously expressed as a ‘burning’, a ‘sickness’, a ‘poison’, a ‘wound’ and an ‘arrow’ passing ‘straight into my innards’. These hints of physicality almost feel like something he’s ...”

“... in the next. The belief was made explicit by atheists such as Baron d’Holbach, whose Système de la nature (1770) reproached the clergy for making people’s lives miserable while comforting them with the delusory hope of a happier life in the hereafter. The mainstream Enlightenment, by contrast, was not against religion as such: what its advocates wanted ...”

“... were verbal supporters of the Argentine side in what’s usually called by Spaniards la guerra de las Malvinas. They, too, refuse to call the islands Falklands. But this is not the first time that the Nobel Prize-winner of 1982 has lied in print, and not only in the banana republic of his fiction. He lies about any subject that takes his fancy. On Sundays ...”

“... it was so hot that they decided to take their clothes off and eat their picnic in the nude.The Marquis deSade set an only slightly more improbable scene in Juliette on the crater’s edge, and Goethe, who ascended Vesuvius in 1787 with his unenthusiastic companion Johann Heinrich Tischbein, recalled his last sight ...”

“... In 1834 Chateaubriand described the Terror of 1793-94 as ‘quite simply a mental illness’. De Tocqueville’s experience in suppressing the revolution of 1848 persuaded him that ‘in revolutions, especially democratic revolutions, madmen, not those so called by courtesy, but genuine madmen, have played a very considerable political ...”

“... pink curtains and the rich variety of outré library books crammed down the backs of sofas: the Marquis deSade, Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, Octave Mirbeau’s Torture Garden. The 1917 revolutions, staged conveniently on his doorstep, caught him unawares. On 25 October, the night the Bolsheviks stormed the ...”