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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to overthrow the destructive construction of gender in Western society, such as Monique Wittig and Roland Barthes,’ Ramadan writes, ‘Garréta set about subverting the way gender works in the French language in order to combat its sexist nature.’ This doesn’t seem quite right, since subverting something normally means more than avoiding its ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was a luxury to be had only in Gosport or Southampton. ‘Who plays the piano today?’ asks Roland Barthes. ‘Playing has ceased to exist.’ Well, actually, it hasn’t. But the rhetorical point stands. In the age before radio and the gramophone, to satisfy a desire for music required much more of an active effort than it does nowadays, when for ...”

“... fascism was a scourge of nature, then no one was to blame. ‘Evil sometimes has a human face,’ Roland Barthes wrote in the second of two articles about the novel in 1955, ‘and about this The Plague says nothing.’ The Nazis were agents of history and not some microbe (to redirect one of the favourite Nazi metaphors for their Jewish victims). It ...”

“... and analysis. ‘Japan has afforded him’ – the author – ‘a situation of writing,’ Roland Barthes wrote in Empire of Signs. This situation is ‘one in which a certain disturbance of the person occurs, a subversion of earlier readings, a shock of meaning lacerated, extenuated to the point of its irreplaceable void.’ Japan, to put it in ...”