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“... book – which is not to be confused with the stories told in the book? In her introduction to it, Susan Sontag passes on the information about the author which she has gleaned from his son and daughter-in-law, who now live in California. The facts are at once painful and inspiriting. Born in 1926 of Russian Jewish parents who had both been ...”

“... body.’ Had she not read Illness as Metaphor, the great work of her fellow New York intellectual Susan Sontag? Reclaiming the meaning of one’s own life is one thing, but seeking succour in sympathetic magic is another. Was it perhaps that Acker had already used cancer so much as a metaphor in her writing that when she came to confront it as a material ...”

“... That the Serbs were not heroic defenders of Christian values but plotters of ethnic cleansing. Susan Sontag and Bernard-Henri Lévy felt it their duty to visit Sarajevo and publicise its plight. It was, as Sontag put it, the Spanish Civil War for her generation. Was this version any closer to reality than ...”

“... in some of which the nude figures were suitably draped. In her novel The Volcano Lover Susan Sontag imagined Hamilton’s horror at this endless reproduction of his beloved vase. ‘Everyone could have, should have, a Portland Vase’ – but who could really love a vase which had become a mere ‘notion’? An ironic paradox is that while the ...”

“... writers have expressed ‘selfness’, and is often caustic about the journals of, for instance, Susan Sontag and Sylvia Plath. Her own accounts deliberately avoid soul-searching and the quest for self-discovery. In Girl with Dove, the funnier, less bleak of the two books, she imagines her neighbours as characters from a murder mystery; in this ...”

“... mean Frank Sinatra and Studio 54, it meant Alfred Kazin and Lionel Trilling, Lillian Hellman and Susan Sontag. I loved its papers, the swagger of the contributors, the New York intellectuals, with their neuroses, their arguments, their marriages, and their parties. Wilson’s disagreement with Nabokov, Lillian’s fight with Mary, and Norman’s fights ...”

“... portrait of a literary figure who remains – despite the highest praise from W.G. Sebald and Susan Sontag, among other admirers – stubbornly elusive. It has not always been easy, for Anglophone readers in particular, to place Walser’s strange productions. Kafka, who admired Walser’s newspaper work, is the inevitable comparison. The Viennese ...”

“... films 15 times. Nor, of course, does she lack detractors; the fiercest in recent years has been Susan Sontag, who traced a line of Fascist exaltation right through the oeuvre, from The Blue Light via Triumph of the Will to the photographic essays on the Nuba. Obsessed by these extremes of approval or censure, Riefenstahl seems unable to look back on ...”

“... not Abelard and Héloïse and never mind Dorothea and Casaubon. No breath of scandal attaches to Susan Sontag, much admired and desired as she was and is. My old comrade Norman Birnbaum was once married to Edith Kurtzweil, who still helps to bring out the etiolated remnant of PR. As far as I know, theirs was a separation on principled grounds. Hannah ...”

“... office, the way it would suddenly begin scrolling out possible futures. ‘Yes, why not?’ from Susan Sontag. A blast of rage from Harold Pinter. A request from Hitchens and a poem by Heaney. They’ve now got Seamus’s fax machine behind glass in his hometown museum in Bellaghy, and, when I saw it the other day, I recalled the squeal and purr it ...”

“... the corpus of Mapplethorpe, and the life under consideration, with a bias, a predilection for what Susan Sontag once baptised ‘the pornographic imagination’. And if photography – Mapplethorpe’s, at this moment – incites my regard, it is because some great specimens of that relatively new art are indistinguishable from pornography. I want to see ...”

“... an infinite extent and degree, lowering to the spirit.’ But some people rose to the occasion. Susan Sontag was absolutely superb. She stood up proudly where everyone could see her and denounced the hirelings of the ayatollah … Cowardice is horribly infectious, but in that abysmal week she showed that courage can be infectious too. I loved her. This ...”

“... understand modernism as the kind of art that encourages ‘encrustations of interpretation’, as Susan Sontag put it a few months later. Like Sontag, Barthelme wanted his readers to accept ‘not-knowing’ and to ‘feel more’, not less.Both agreed, too, that the literary text should be considered ‘an object in ...”

“... piece in praise of things which HM Government thinks very bad for your health. The price of what Susan Sontag has praised as Hitchens’s ‘high velocity’ can be the occasional slip: Disraeli did not ‘become’ prime minister in 1876, nor did Queen Victoria become Empress of India ‘within a few years’ (it was actually 1876); nor did Eden resign ...”

“... while for others it is science, secularism, democracy, the death of God or the Holocaust. Susan Sontag thought the whole subject scarcely worth discussing, since in her view tragedy had never been central to Western theatre. Raymond Williams’s Modern Tragedy maintains that all the obituary notices are premature. The essays here on modern drama ...”