“... choose to call his book The Autobiography of a Thief ? It was, he says, a bit of homage to Jean Genet. The Thief’s Journal was being translated into English just as Bruce and Buster and Charlie were driving £2,631,684 in mail bags to Leather-slade Farm on 8 August 1963, with Tony Bennett singing ‘The Good Life’ on the radio. When Buster ...”

“... century, Maschler is English but not quite English enough. Like Anthony Blond, the publisher of Jean Genet and Harold Robbins, he is ‘A Jew Made in England’, as the title of Blond’s memoir had it. The outline of Maschler’s career also recalls that of John Calder, whose memoir, Pursuit, was published in 2001, to another general kicking. Born in ...”

“... Glas should bear with him through the punishing tortuosities of its parallel texts on Hegel and on Jean Genet. The author of Glas is Derrida the writer, casting yet more doubt on the credentials of philosophy ‘proper’ by apparently allowing the surface accidents of language to call his own textual tune; the result is an arrogant show of that mix of ...”

“... or palliative scheme’, which makes it sound more like King Lear. The rest of the book is about Jean Genet, Lampedusa (and also Visconti’s film of The Leopard), Britten’s Death in Venice (and Thomas Mann’s novella): all cases in which it is easy enough for interpreters to discover or insert some version of lateness. There is nothing mechanical or ...”

“... bohemia’, who worked for the Herald Tribune, and who some say was the inspiration for the Jean Seberg role in A bout de souffle. Sontag would write ecstatically of Sohmers – ‘It’s she, it’s she, it’s she’ – but they also gave each other bruises and pushed each other to tears. (When things got really bad, Sontag copied sentences from ...”

“... best book to date is Difficult Women, an unflattering account of his friendship with Sonia Orwell, Jean Rhys and Germaine Greer. He won’t be winning first prize for dignity, but he tells it pretty much like it was – and like he was, you imagine. But discretion is never his first instinct. As for Stephen himself, I sometimes wonder if he wants me to write ...”

“... The Erl King. All his publishers have managed to come up with is an ambiguous commendation from Genet: ‘An exceptional, incomparable novel’. Le Roi des Aulnes is the only novel to have won the Prix Goncourt by unanimous decision, but Les Météores has enjoyed less acclaim, and it is not hard to see why: it is the work of a mind expanding under the ...”

“... dance, quoting older songs – ‘Look at that caveman go!’ – in a funny voice, giving ‘Jean Genie’ a smell of Jean Genet, chanting to a jolly tune: ‘All your nightmares came today, and it looks as if they’re here to stay!’ His movies, photographs and record covers are as decadent, ghostly and ...”

“... and mourning and ecstasy and regret, all arrive together in Powell’s poems, as in the prose of Jean Genet, and it is a persistent, over-civilised folly to think that we can sort them out. Nor can we separate youth from maturity (the crematorium will always be close to the high school). The supposed stages of life (rebellious adolescence, committed ...”

“... Once the most celebrated intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre had, until quite recently, almost faded from view. He was already being attacked for his ‘blindness’ about the Soviet gulags shortly after his death in 1980, and even his humanist Existentialism was ridiculed for its optimism, voluntarism and sheer energetic reach ...”

“... making sense of his writing. Derrida’s thesis on Husserl revealed him to be, in the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s words, ‘fully armed and helmeted, like Athena’. All he lacked was ‘a certain youth, with its playfulness’. As a student he had frequent bouts of anxiety and depression. ‘I’m no good for anything except taking the world apart and ...”

“... often appear on late-night television shows in a leather jacket and neon wig to hold forth about Jean Genet (overwritten), incest (occasionally positive) and bareback sex in the gay community (acceptable between consenting adults of the same HIV status). He riled the French chapter of ACT UP, which accused him of ideological irresponsibility and made ...”

“... period.Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless NightsOh, God, what depressing places hotel bedrooms can be.Jean Rhys, QuartetThe​ image on the front of Late Fragments is a portrait taken by the Belgian photographer Charles Neyt in 1864. Start with those eyes: distrustful, assessing, imperious. An art critic’s eyes. Rakish eyes. Pharmacopoeia eyes. His face is ...”

“... 38. She had just finished The Ethics of Ambiguity, and was wondering what to write next. Urged by Jean Genet, she went to see the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, on show for the first time after the war. Citizen Kane was also being shown in Paris for the first time, and Beauvoir was impressed: Orson Welles had revolutionised cinema. Politics was not an ...”

“... Kathy Acker writes them and reads them. She has written into her fiction the hostile French writer Jean Genet, godfather of punk, and it seems she was a reader of Smollett when she was at school. She writes of an anxious and dangerous sexual existence beside which the violence of the 18th-century comic novel pales. Acker’s, as it happens, is not the ...”