The Cruiser

Christopher Hitchens, 22 February 1996

On the Eve of the Millennium: The Future of Democracy through an Age of Unreason 
by Conor Cruise O’Brien.
Free Press, 168 pp., £7.99, February 1996, 0 02 874094 7
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... Nietzsche. Quoting himself from an earlier incarnation, he writes in a synthesis of the worst of Camus and the worst of Sartre: The advanced world may well be like, and feel like, a closed and guarded palace, in a city gripped by the plague. There is another metaphor, developed by André Gide, one of the many powerful minds powerfully influenced by ...

Book of Bad Ends

Paul Keegan: French Short Stories, 7 September 2023

The Penguin Book of French Short Stories: Vol I 
edited by Patrick McGuinness.
Penguin Classics, 483 pp., £30, October 2022, 978 0 241 46199 0
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The Penguin Book of French Short Stories: Vol II 
edited by Patrick McGuinness.
Penguin Classics, 352 pp., £30, October 2022, 978 0 241 46205 8
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... as easily have deserted.’ The inconclusiveness of the story is present from the outset.Charles-Albert Cingria’s prose walkabout, ‘The Grass Snake’, is a comparable feat. Its subject is a water snake that lives under a large flat stone near a lakeside castle, and is a much loved local personality, though a figure of naked terror to unsuspecting ...

The Tongue Is a Fire

Ferdinand Mount: The Trouble with Free Speech, 22 May 2025

What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea 
by Fara Dabhoiwala.
Allen Lane, 472 pp., £30, March, 978 0 241 34747 8
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... most influential of all these tracts has been Le Grand Remplacement by the French novelist Renaud Camus (no relation of Albert), published in 2011.You might dismiss all these books as tiresome background noise, but all of a sudden they began to generate terrifying effects. A few months before ...

Soul Bellow

Craig Raine, 12 November 1987

More die of heartbreak 
by Saul Bellow.
Alison Press/Secker, 335 pp., £10.95, October 1987, 0 436 03962 1
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... poetry was the material of my own life.’ Athol Fugard has acknowledged a similar debt to Camus. After apprentice work which struggled to accommodate South African material in the dramatic forms supplied by Tennessee Williams, Clifford Odets, Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller, Fugard found what he needed in ...

Where Life Is Seized

Adam Shatz: Frantz Fanon’s Revolution, 19 January 2017

Écrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté 
by Frantz Fanon, edited by Robert Young and Jean Khalfa.
La Découverte, 688 pp., £22, October 2015, 978 2 7071 8638 6
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... by Merleau-Ponty, whose lectures he attended; gripped by the engagé theatre of Sartre and Camus, and the novels of Richard Wright and Chester Himes. He was also reading Jaspers, Nietzsche, Hegel, Bergson, Bachelard and Lacan – the ‘logician of madness’, he called him, partly in jest. He dreaded the ‘larval, stocky, obsolete life that awaits me ...