“... occasions when language draws attention to itself, when it becomes ‘intransitive’, as Roland Barthes preferred to put it, and is relieved of its referential and instrumental duties. Bakhtin is as attentive to the language of literature as any Formalist could wish, but he comes to radically different conclusions about its nature. The ...”

“... was a discrete journey, with its own characteristics, its challenges and its perils, so that, as Roland Barthes pointed out, the Tour had a Homeric quality. It was exceptionally exciting in a predominantly rural society to watch the Tour de France go by, and roads were lined with spectators who did not normally have the opportunity of seeing great ...”

“... are not the opposing parties he takes them to be, nor are they in any critic. Criticism, as Roland Barthes says, begins when we think about our subjectivity, not when we get rid of it. When Auden writes subjectively, he often says what we feel. He does this when he writes objectively too, although sometimes he simply voices the general wisdom of ...”

“... system began. No Irish writer was banned after Lee Dunne in 1976, though books by Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes and Angela Carter were banned in the 1980s, which is strange, because that’s when I read them all. In 1979 information about contraception became legal, though you couldn’t legally buy condoms without a prescription until 1985. Ten years ...”

“... problems that intrude on the conscience of the holiday maker. It’s forty years or more since Roland Barthes unpicked the Guide Bleu. The sting in the tale of that consummate essay was reserved for the guff about the ‘prosperity’ of Spain twenty years after the defeat of the Republic: ‘the Guide does not tell us, of course, how this fine ...”

“... despair of the other tenants’, suggests a ‘body language’ that would have delighted Roland Barthes. If Ducasse was indeed nicknamed ‘The Vampire’ at school, can this shed light on the recurrent figure of the vampire in Maldoror? When he died, books by Poe and Eugène Sue were supposedly found on his bedside table. Might this indicate ...”

“... hear the French differently. In Proust I invariably hear intelligence, this so Proustian word, as Roland Barthes said, as ‘intelligence’ and nothing else, but I can see this doesn’t always work. Here’s an instance of a tie between the versions. I couldn’t understand either of them at this point, and I didn’t do much better with the ...”

“... reading a letter (more are scattered on the ground) and dressed in deep mourning.In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes dissected a photograph of a similar scene at Balmoral and decided that Brown represented the punctum of the image: the small detail that ‘pierces the viewer’. Barthes seems not to have known who Brown ...”

“... methodical, rigorous discipline, and its desire to break away from discipline, science and method. Roland Barthes’s analysis of photography employs the ‘scientific’ discourse of semiology, the general science of signs, in order to demonstrate the way photography explodes that science and asserts its magic and madness. Gayatri Spivak experiments with ...”

“... programme’ and set Mitterrand on the road to power, Tel Quel organised a works outing to China (Roland Barthes was among the distinguished guests). Shortly afterwards, the journal abandoned Maoism. Under Giscard’s technocratic authoritarian regime, radical alternatives – neither Maoism, nor Stalinism – continued at the margins of the common ...”

“... least because it shared significant preoccupations with a new generation of theorists, including Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Both the new novelists and the new theorists detested Balzacian realism and psychological character studies, and embraced a formalist view of language, embedded in an anti-humanist view of ...”

“... magnificent new Les Structures du Quotidien.3 ‘Food is a sort of grill,’ wrote the late Roland Barthes, ‘through which all the sciences which we now call social and human may successfully be exercised.’4 Eating was one of Barthes’s own best topics: bleeding steak, sugar, photographs of food in Elle, the ...”

“... reflection and name-dropping (apparently modelled on the sometimes charming tendentiousness of Roland Barthes), this flabby notion gets expounded in a characteristically portentous way: ‘To keep things apart, distinct, separate (man and woman; life and death; beginning and end; the inside and the outside of a text; life and story), to define them in ...”

“... once the squadron was brought under Spanish control – and then named after him! (What fun the Roland Barthes of Mythologies would have had with the story of Malraux crouched down in the fuselage reading the plays of Corneille when his plane was being shot at.) The novel that came out of Spain is securely grounded socially and territorially as the ...”

“... is wide, to Virginia Woolf, to William Gass, to Susan Sontag, to Lester Bangs and to Roland Barthes (his first and most important inspiration). Most practitioners regard essay-writing as a sideline – Davenport set store by his stories, so much less vital than his non-fictional prose – but Dillon sees ‘some version of the essay’ as ...”