Search Results

“... The last piece in L’Eté, a collection of Camus’s essays first published in 1954, ends on a characteristic note of risk and grandeur: ‘I have always had the impression of living on the high seas, threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness.’ The high seas and the happiness frame and reduce the threat, perhaps even make it part of the glamour, part of the flourish ...”

“... It is all but thirty-five years since Albert Camus was killed, when the Facel Vega sports car in which he was a passenger went off the road between Sens and Paris. Among his things was found Le Premier homme, the manuscript he had been working on for nearly a year at the time of the accident and on which there was still some way to go ...”

“... By the time Albert Camus received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 the nuanced position he took on the Algerian revolution had caused a scandal in orthodox progressive circles. Camus kept as quiet as he could because he feared terrorist reprisals against his mother, who was still living in Algiers ...”

“... hope but don’t. The boys are reading L’Etranger as summer reading. My country, ’tis of thee, Albert Camus! The host sprinted upstairs to grab his fellow existentialist – To drag him downstairs to the embassy’s July 4th garden party. The ambassador’s son died horribly the following year In a ski lodge ...”

“... he’ll be back shortly with more of the same once the session on the citrus harvest opens. When Albert Camus filed these pieces, he had already joined and left the Communist Party, where he got a sketchy education in the thrills and pitfalls of the militant’s life, plunging into agitprop theatre and play readings in the suburbs of Algiers. He ...”

“... There are too many myths about Camus. One of the most persistent, first propagated in Britain by Cyril Connolly’s Introduction to the 1946 translation of L’Etranger, was that he ‘played a notable part in the French Resistance Movement’. The much-photographed figure in a trench coat, with Humphrey Bogart features, certainly looked like Hollywood’s idea of an underground hero ...”

“... Albert Camus​ hated travelling. ‘Fear is the price of travel,’ he wrote in his journal of an unhappy trip through Central Europe in the summer of 1935, where he found himself gripped by ‘an instinctive desire to regain the shelter of old habits’. For Camus, who had tuberculosis, travel abroad raised the prospect not only of psychic unease but of illness: ‘We are feverish but porous ...”

“... In​ 1957, Albert Memmi published a slender but explosive book, Portrait du colonisé précédé de Portrait du colonisateur, later translated as The Coloniser and the Colonised. Memmi was a Jew from Tunisia; he was in his late thirties and firmly on the left. At the time of publication, France had entered the fourth year of an undeclared war against nationalist insurgents in Algeria; it had lost its imperial foothold in Indochina in 1954 and was now determined to hang on to its possessions in Africa ...”

“... a fallen angel, and passed, like our best ambitions, from soiled hand to soiled hand, and took Albert Camus who dressed me in black and told me to grow a beard and pronounced me an Existentialist through tears of laughter, and took Sigmund Freud who sat at my shoulder throughout one bookblind summer foxing me utterly, and took, one by one, like a ...”

“... After this, George Orwell is discussed with special attention to The Lion and the Unicorn and Albert Camus in relation to the Algerian war. The following three chapters are devoted to Simone de Beauvoir, Marcuse and Foucault. The last author (and the only live one) is the exiled Afrikaner Breyten Breytenbach. What do these writers have in common? One ...”

“... of Business, was – but, of course – the clerk to the Privy Council who revised Prince Albert’s speeches for publication; those Essays were written in 1841. Another English philosopher whose name rings a slightly louder (and slightly cracked) bell is James Douglas, the Beaverbrook director who specialised in attacking books like The Well of ...”

“... hairdo belongs in the same world as Gunter Grass’s prose. They know all about Nabokov and Camus, and not just because the pair of them kept goal. A recent new-wave soccer-book gives something of the flavour: Albert Camus, Algerian goalie and French Existentialist, never took a penalty but it would have been ...”

“... apparent enough even in the unnecessary little gathering, with its wholly haphazard annotation, of Albert Camus’s American Journals, two-thirds of which are given to his trip to South America in 1949. The comments on a trip to the United States in 1946 deserve the consideration duly accorded a postcard from someone who feels compelled to send it. We are ...”

“... around him: it’s not just a whodunnit but also a whattheydone. When Pierrot came out in 1942, Albert Camus reviewed it as ‘an ambiguous fairy tale blending the spectacles of everyday life with a timeless melancholy’; the philosopher Alexandre Kojève saw the novel’s passive, likeable hero as an avatar of the Hegelian sage. Compare and contrast ...”

“... but placed Khadra’s ‘chilling portrait of fundamentalism’ squarely ‘in the tradition of Albert Camus’. In every review, it is dutifully reported that Moulessehoul took his feminine nom de plume to avoid military censorship, and that he lives ‘in exile’ in southern France. The impression given is that Khadra is a dissident, rather than a ...”