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“... monument to Picasso was commissioned by Barcelona City Council. It sits on the edge of Parc de la Ciutadella on the busy, dusty downtown street named for Picasso. It has a more mysterious and shadowy presence than any other piece of modern public sculpture in Barcelona, such as Chillida’s stark, severe piece of cast-iron in Plaça del Rei, or ...”

“... terms, as a rare public instance of the normally suppressed discourse of madness. Now, from the man who coached Foucault in philosophy, we have another bold and engrossing first-person work which could have borne the title ‘Moi Louis Althusser ayant étranglé ma femme ... ’, for L’Avenir dure longtemps is the garlanded Marxist philosopher’s long ...”

“... and anger upon the self. So it is no surprise that Roger should characterise himself as a bad man: for example, here, in a portrait of the evil, paranoid voyeur. Secret glimpses ... of life proceeding unaware of my watching have always excited me. Of the days of my ministry I remember keenly the lit windows of my unsuspecting parishioners as I ...”

“... by a vitriolic press as tasteless, embarrassing and exhibitionist, and thrived only as a succès de scandale. Alienated from theatrical fashion first by 1950s Absurdism and then by what he describes as ‘a newly influential and resentful 1960s avant-garde’, Miller never recovered his influence or his reputation in the States. With the single exception of ...”

“... two-day ticket at £80, for which I got a red plastic bracelet. I had to keep it on overnight, the man told me; it would be fine in the bath or shower. Not many other people had red bracelets, I couldn’t help but notice. A lot had red ribbons round their necks with ID cards hanging from them – they were Contributors. Others had yellow ribbons, denoting ...”

“... and readers were understood instinctively and by habit to do right by their stomachs: ‘every man in his humour’; ‘you should eat what you are’; ‘chacun à son goût’. Galenic medical theory offered expert explanations of the counsels of proverbial common sense and custom. It was best to eat what was constitutionally similar to you, and when the ...”

“... not money but outstanding feelings. He puts a sheaf of them under his pillow. ‘The doomed man’s brain grew warmer and warmer with a sense of communion’ and he starts to write replies. He lies naked on his cot in the July heat, and his one large hand ‘made joyless love to his body, exploring all of those erogenous zones that the fingers of ...”

“... In the spring​ of 1961, Frantz Fanon wrote to his publisher in Paris to suggest that he ask Jean-Paul Sartre for a preface to his anti-colonial manifesto, The Wretched of the Earth. ‘Tell him that every time I sit down at my desk, I think of him.’ For revolutionary intellectuals in the Third World, Sartre seemed miraculously uncontaminated by the paternalism – and hypocrisy – that gave the white left such a bad reputation ...”

“... in their talk, then explains that ‘you suddenly seem to me to be bathed in blood.’ Paul Eluard, Eisenstein’s guest, stands up during the swanky first night of La Voix Humaine to shout Merde! Merde! Merde! and be mobbed – in cartoon prose – by the dinner-jacketed audience of the Comédie Française (‘short fat little arms have seized ...”

“... Cade/ Jack Smith, Jack Moon, poor Jack of every trade.’ With the line, ‘One of the Lords of No Man’s Land, good Lob’, we get a topical piece of ambiguity: the poem was written in 1915, when Thomas had already enlisted (he was killed at Arras in 1917). Thomas set out to shape his poetry in ways inevitably, rather than deliberately, English: he made the ...”

“... dozen settings and scores of characters, each treated with impartial sympathy and curiosity. This man is a general, that one a physicist, the next, Eichmann. Grossman was also brave enough to equate the Nazi camps with Stalin’s gulags: a truth-telling for which he and the book were both made to suffer. Life and Fate was completed in 1960, but not published ...”

“... In Dante’s Inferno the serpentine Gerione, a monster with the counterfeit face of a beautiful man and a sting in his scorpion tail, carries Dante and Virgil down to hell on his back. Gustave Doré gave him the wings of a giant bat. Caravaggio borrowed eagle’s wings from Orazio Gentileschi for his figure of Eros: they seem to have been a most covetable ...”

“... great conurbations. Considered as a people-mover, the elevator ranks with those other epochal Fin-de-Siècle inventions, the motor car and the aeroplane. Like them, it combines high speed with a high degree of insulation from the outside world. It’s a vertical bullet train, a space rocket forever stuck in its silo – at least until the moment in Tim ...”

“... On 6 April, Dowd, certain that the hierarchy might listen better if criticism of them came from a man rather than a woman, quoted from her ‘conservative and devout’ brother Kevin’s views on where the Church was going, mentioning that she had learned, ‘shockingly’, that she and her brother ‘agreed on some things’. ‘Vatican II made me ...”

“... involving the whole rigmarole of the Party Conference, they have made any leader impregnable, de facto, until such time as he or she wants to quit. This was hardly the intention in 1981! Together with the ever-increasing speed of ‘events’ – the greatest influence, as Macmillan has told us, on any administration – patronage inoculates governments ...”