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 ...