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“... of the moment, Breton gave the Surrealist movement a national cast in the Manifesto. From the Marquis deSade through Baudelaire and Rimbaud to Alfred Jarry and Raymond Roussel, most of the antecedents he named were French, and he credited the ur-method of Surrealism to two compatriots, Isidore Ducasse (aka ...”

“... began as a very minor affair. Strakhov assumed that Dostoevsky had become what he himself was, a de Maistre-like reactionary, not indeed such a reactionary as Katkov of the Russian Messenger and the extreme Slavophils, but a believer in the saving virtues of the Russian earth (Pochvennichestvo) and old Russian communal institutions (Obschina) as against ...”

“... matters. There are dreamers and dreamers. Great dreamers, on the whole, are saints or sinners (the Marquis deSade, Simon Stylites), variations on innocence, whom we revere or abhor, while your everyday small-scale worldly dreamer (the bloke down the road who wants to build a conservatory, the woman saving up for a ...”

“... he may find himself bereft, his hand having nowhere to land. He ponders the last years of the Marquis deSade, patron saint of cruel scatology and role model, observing that at the age of 50 he began an affair with an actress twenty years his junior. ‘She remained loyal to him until his death, 24 years later ...”

“... when, as Feldman writes, ‘older Frenchmen still harboured memories of Crescentini, whom Alfred de Vigny recalled in 1835 as having had a “seraphic voice coming from a worn and wrinkled face”.’ Crescentini (1762-1846) makes a brief appearance in The Charterhouse of Parma; his singing style is also analysed in Stendhal’s Life of Rossini. Balzac’s ...”

“... new book. Bersani accuses practitioners of lesbian and gay studies (myself not excepted) of ‘de-gaying’ gayness. He seems to intend at least two different, and not entirely consistent, things by the accusation: 1. queer theorists have taken the sex out of (homo)sexuality, by claiming gayness either as a personal identity or as a mode of political ...”

“... of the rank futility of home and hearth is equalled, in literature, only by that expressed by the Marquis deSade.) These are degenerated, cannibal families, in which the very sacrament of the family, the communal meal when all are gathered together, is a Barmecide feast at which some family member, wife or child, is ...”

“... his conjugal duties; followed by a bed-switch involving more dupery (taken from Philippe de Laon’s One Hundred New Tales); followed by a moralité about a vengeful wife who murders and dismembers her husband (by François de Rosset). A more refined example of romance (a cloudy category), from a later ...”

“... chance he had to ingratiate himself with the First Lady with an ill-considered comment about the Marquis deSade. (That far even a Francophile such as Jackie wasn’t willing to go.) It might have made Mailer’s mustard even hotter had he known that a few years later, after the president was assassinated, Styron ...”

“... something creepy about British light entertainment and there always has been. Joe Orton meets the Marquis deSade at the end of the pier, with a few Union Jacks fluttering in the stink and a mother-in-law tied in bunting to a ducking-stool. Those of us who grew up on it liked its oddness without quite understanding how ...”

“... studied in the outside world, there were aspects of them that could never be emulated. Madame de la Tour du Pin spoke in her memoirs of the strange gliding walk that the ladies of Versailles developed to prevent them from treading on each others’ trains. Rouge, also, had a peculiar function as caste-mark. It was applied with a heavy hand and in a ...”

“... of serial killers, leaving their fingerprints everywhere), and sometimes abstract (the Esprit de Système, the Idea of Freedom, Capitalism ...). Many of the accused seemed convincing culprits at the time, but such is the nature of historical inquiry that even the occasional Holmes among historians failed to make the charges stick for ...”

“... the art of getting all the secret stuff out in public, is an irreducibly political form. Sade, we know, mostly wrote his wank-manuals while in prison during the French Revolution. He was a man of specialised and unpleasant sexual interests, but he was also a radical political theorist, with much to teach about the dialectics of sex and power, for ...”