John Sturrock

John Sturrock was the LRB’s consulting editor from 1993 until his death in August 2017. He had been the deputy editor of the TLS for many years before that. He translated Stendhal, Victor Hugo, Georges Perec and Proust, among others; and wrote books on Borges, structuralism, autobiography and the Pyrenees. The View from Paris, a collection of essays on postwar French intellectuals, was published in 1998. Many of those essays first appeared in the LRB, along with occasional pieces on cricket.

Letter

What if it had been April?

21 July 2005

John Sturrock writes: The removal of the Aznar government, and its replacement by a government that abjured any close identification with Bush/Blair and brought the Spanish contingents back from Iraq, was, as far as I’m concerned, a beneficial effect of the atrocity in Madrid. There is nothing ‘distasteful’ in drawing attention, even in the case of terrorist acts, to the well-known law of unintended...
Letter

Who owns John Sutherland?

7 January 1999

John Sturrock writes: Two interpretations are possible of the fact that, to date, only two people have asked for their incognito to stay. One is the interpretation implied if not stated in Deborah McVea and Jeremy Treglown’s letter: that the great majority are either happy to be identified, or don’t care sufficiently to object. The other interpretation is that, like myself, weekly reader of the...
Letter

Sonic Boom

1 October 1998

It was good of Don Miller (Letters, 1 October) to read what I wrote about W.G. Grace as a disguised riposte to the claque whose variously abusive recriminations had earlier been launched against what I wrote about its heroes, Sokal and Bricmont, whose book I’m confident few of them have read. Since I don’t feel that the ‘W.G.’ piece quite confronted any of the arguments arising, I’d like...
Letter

The Paris Strangler

17 December 1992

As Paddy Lyons (Letters, 28 January) sees it, the strangling of Hélène Rytmann by Louis Althusser was a folie à deux: she wanted him to kill her and he in a moment of lunacy obliged. This is one ‘explanation’ of his act offered by Althusser himself in L’Avenir dure longtemps. But how, by accepting it as the right explanation, does Lyons make things any better for Althusser who, it now turns...
Letter

Private Sartre

7 February 1985

SIR: It is careless of Mr Gardner to have left out from his letter (Letters, 7 March) the evidence on which he bases his rosy view of Sartre. I wrote that Sartre was ‘self-centred’, not ‘self-indulgent’, and so, judging by the War Diaries, he was, I would like to know what, in these fluent and cocky entries, Mr Gardner sees as the expression of Sartre’s ‘impotence’ or ‘suffering’....

Pieces about John Sturrock in the LRB

The Thing: Versions of Proust

Michael Wood, 6 January 2005

What was it Proust said about paradise? That all paradises are lost paradises? That the only true paradise is a lost paradise? That it isn’t paradise until it’s lost? That paradise is...

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Roger Poole on the seductions and dangers of structuralism

Roger Poole, 5 June 1980

John Sturrock’s little book is the best single guide to its subject that has yet appeared. Structuralism and Since demands, though, that its title be taken literally. It traces, technically...

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