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Here was a plague

Tom Crewe, 27 September 2018

How to Survive a Plague: The Story of How Activists and Scientists Tamed Aids 
by David France.
Picador, 624 pp., £12.99, September 2017, 978 1 5098 3940 7
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Patient Zero and the Making of the Aids Epidemic 
by Richard A. McKay.
Chicago, 432 pp., £26.50, November 2017, 978 0 226 06395 9
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Modern Nature: The Journals of Derek Jarman, 1989-90 
by Derek Jarman.
Vintage, 314 pp., £9.99, May 2018, 978 1 78487 387 5
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Smiling in Slow Motion: The Journals of Derek Jarman, 1991-94 
by Derek Jarman.
Vintage, 388 pp., £9.99, August 2018, 978 1 78487 516 9
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The Ward 
by Gideon Mendel.
Trolley, 88 pp., £25, December 2017, 978 1 907112 56 0
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... not feel it yet. Might not know it yet, except you did. ‘A new class of lifetime pariahs’, Susan Sontag called them in Aids and Its Metaphors: ‘the future ill’. The artist and film-maker Derek Jarman remembered his HIV diagnosis, in 1986: I thought: this is not true, then I realised the enormity. I had been pushed into yet another corner, this ...

When the beam of light has gone

Peter Wollen: Godard Turns Over, 17 September 1998

The Films of Jean-Luc Godard 
by Wheeler Winston Dixon.
SUNY, 290 pp., £17.99, March 1997, 0 7914 3285 8
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Speaking about Godard 
by Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki.
New York, 256 pp., $55, July 1998, 0 8147 8066 0
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... serious writing in English about Godard came from the Sixties – from Richard Roud, Manny Farber, Susan Sontag, Robin Wood, Raymond Durgnat and others. This reflected Godard’s much greater cultural centrality during that period and also his apparently secure place within the festival and art film system. When Godard veered off-course with the Dziga ...

As Astonishing as Elvis

Jenny Turner: Ayn Rand, 1 December 2005

Ayn Rand 
by Jeff Britting.
Duckworth, 155 pp., £12.99, February 2005, 0 7156 3269 8
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... who brought her own version of the American dream to the new country. Like Simone de Beauvoir or Susan Sontag, she would become famous not for particular books, but for herself in general, as a cipher, a public intellectual. Someone has perhaps already designed the wallpaper on their computer, a repeating pattern of potato-prints: turban, Mallen ...

A Use for the Stones

Jacqueline Rose: On Being Nadine Gordimer, 20 April 2006

Get a Life 
by Nadine Gordimer.
Bloomsbury, 187 pp., £16.99, November 2005, 0 7475 8175 4
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... over from Britain ‘the colonial position of an occupying power’. (A year later, she urged Susan Sontag not to accept the Jerusalem Prize.) Bannerman is, in his own words, a ‘conservationist’. This makes him, in part, a throwback to Gordimer’s 1974 novel of that title, a negative pastoral focused on Mehring, a dissociated, nihilistic, white ...

At the Crime Scene

Adam Shatz: Robbe-Grillet’s Bad Thoughts, 31 July 2014

A Sentimental Novel 
by Alain Robbe-Grillet, translated by D.E. Brooke.
Dalkey Archive, 142 pp., £9.50, April 2014, 978 1 62897 006 7
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... it.’ The task was to liberate the novel from the ‘tyranny of significations’, an idea that Susan Sontag soon lifted in Against Interpretation. Depth, character and humanism, as Robbe-Grillet saw it, were ‘obsolete notions’ that stood in the way of what Barthes called the pleasure of the text, and Sontag the ...

Jottings, Scraps and Doodles

Adam Shatz: Lévi-Strauss, 3 November 2011

Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory 
by Patrick Wilcken.
Bloomsbury, 375 pp., £30, November 2011, 978 0 7475 8362 2
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... mind: what he called, in its raw, ‘unspoiled’ state, ‘la pensée sauvage’. Lévi-Strauss, Susan Sontag claimed in 1963, had ‘invented the profession of the anthropologist as a total occupation’. Whether it was anthropology at all is debatable; that it was a remarkable effort to ask the Big Questions is not. Leach grudgingly conceded that ...

Siding with Rushdie

Christopher Hitchens, 26 October 1989

The Rushdie File 
edited by Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland.
Fourth Estate/ICA, 268 pp., £5.95, July 1989, 0 947795 84 7
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CounterBlasts No 4: Sacred Cows 
by Fay Weldon.
Chatto, 43 pp., £2.99, July 1989, 0 7011 3556 5
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Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation 
by Timothy Brennan.
Macmillan, 203 pp., £29.50, September 1989, 0 333 49020 7
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... hostage-trading partners in Iran responsible for any attacks ‘against American interests’? As Susan Sontag said at the PEN meeting held in New York: ‘We found this particularly maddening, since from the very beginning fundamental American interests were at stake: our Constitutional rights to write, publish, sell, buy and read books free of ...

Look at Don Juan

Adam Shatz: Camus in the New World, 19 October 2023

Travels in the Americas: Notes and Impressions of a New World 
by Albert Camus, edited by Alice Kaplan, translated by Ryan Bloom.
Chicago, 152 pp., £16.99, March, 978 0 226 69495 5
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... desert, sky, sun and, above all, the sea, the ‘call of life and an invitation to death’. As Susan Sontag wrote in a 1963 essay, he ‘is at his best when he disburdens himself of the baggage of existential culture … and speaks in his own person’. In Travels in the Americas, he does so with unusual intimacy.Camus made his first and only trip to ...

Palestinianism

Adam Shatz, 6 May 2021

Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said 
by Timothy Brennan.
Bloomsbury, 437 pp., £20, March 2021, 978 1 5266 1465 0
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... tradition of revolutionary intellectuals, but Said doesn’t resemble Gramsci or Fanon so much as Susan Sontag, born two years before him, and, like him, a dissident heir of the New York intellectuals. Both were literary critics who first made a name for themselves as interpreters of French theory for Anglo-American audiences but later broke free of its ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Notes on 1997, 1 January 1998

... intrude on your privacy, but we’re both wearing your underpants.’ Calvin Klein is sitting with Susan Sontag. Actually he isn’t but if he were it would sum up what celebrity means in New York.22 May. Watch the second programme in the BBC2 series It’s Not Unusual, in which gays and lesbians, many in their seventies and eighties, recall their ...

Diary

Alison Light: The death of Raphael Samuel, 22 February 2001

... our second spring). It was never published and he never read it, but it was in part a response to Susan Sontag’s attack on the idea of illness as a metaphor. Metaphors seemed to both of us then a possible defence, protective colouring – provided there were plenty of them, proliferating like vines. For instance, instead of the militarist notions of ...

The Suitcase

Frances Stonor Saunders, 30 July 2020

... bearskins, plumed helmets. The kitsch of Greater Romania under Carol’s rule qualifies for what Susan Sontag called ‘failed seriousness’: one visiting journalist who was granted an interview with the king was astonished to encounter an aide-de-camp in full military rig, ‘a Hollywood ensemble of bright blue and red, golden braid and tassels, and ...

‘That’s my tank on fire’

James Meek: Video War, 13 April 2023

... shown. This new way for non-participants to witness war remotely is a resolution, of sorts, of Susan Sontag’s challenge in the essay Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), where she reprimands a younger intellectual for her ‘conservative’ view that ‘our capacity to respond to our experiences with emotional freshness and ethical pertinence is ...

Moderation or Death

Christopher Hitchens: Isaiah Berlin, 26 November 1998

Isaiah Berlin: A Life 
by Michael Ignatieff.
Chatto, 386 pp., £20, October 1998, 0 7011 6325 9
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The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin 
by György Dalos.
Murray, 250 pp., £17.95, September 2002, 0 7195 5476 4
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... or permitted to reclaim their homes. And there were many comparable instances. He even once told Susan Sontag that he had caught himself thinking of Israel as the old fellow-travellers thought of the Soviet Union. (In the context, or any context, a more than startling admission.) He kept his admonitions, and his reservations, extremely private until the ...

Think Tiny

Mark Ford: Nancification, 17 July 2008

The Nancy Book 
by Joe Brainard.
Siglio, 144 pp., $39.50, April 2008, 978 0 9799562 0 1
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... poet Ann Lauterbach notes that the birth of Brainard’s Nancy was more or less contemporary with Susan Sontag’s ‘Notes on “Camp”’ (1964), which set out to define the different kinds of humour that get lumped under this term. Sontag’s major distinction was between naive and deliberate camp, but it seems to ...

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