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“... a jacket. But it underpins a good deal of postmodern thought, sinking to its nadir in the work of Michel Foucault. ‘Naming,’ Ewen and Ewen write in Foucauldian vein, ‘is a form of exercising power,’ a claim which implies that power is always objectionable. It is not a view that the powerless generally share. Typecasting is an encyclopedic browse ...”

“... with a Christian businessman called Fadi Khoury over the future of Khoury’s hotel, the Saint Georges. The legendary hotel was Lebanon’s – probably the Levant’s – finest. Built in the 1930s for French senior officers, the five-storey building perched on a tiny bay in West Beirut. Battles wrecked and closed it in late 1975. At the war’s ...”

“... of a pitiless antinomian God. Johannes Baader, Jerry Lee Lewis, Gabriel Pomerand, Colin Donellan, Michel Mourre, John of Leyden, Sid Vicious, Poly Styrene: these and many others are the ragged doomsters of Marcus’s secret history. To track their explosive and erratic careers he uses whatever maps he can find: the theoretical writings of Isidore Isou and Guy ...”

“... On the other hand, there is a current of anti-rationalism which runs from the Symbolists and Georges Sorel to Bataille, the Existentialist acte gratuit, deconstruction and Michel Foucault. Both types of thought are radical and conservative at the same time. Rationalism pleases the respectable suburbs in its passion for ...”

“... a right-wing, anti-semitic engineer. When the Nazis occupied France, Deleuze’s older brother, Georges, joined the Resistance; he was captured by the Germans, deported, and murdered en route to Auschwitz. According to Deleuze’s friend the novelist Michel Tournier, Deleuze’s parents ‘created a veritable cult around ...”

“... of black fruits, iron, earth and spicy wood’) with Andrew Jefford in the Financial Times on a Georges Duboeuf 2003 cru Beaujolais (‘This dark wine … helicopters into the mouth with spinning blades of intense fruit,’ combining ‘finesse and elegance with near-beefy depth’), or with the Wall Street Journal on the same type of wine (‘Moving ...”

“... that his paintings were not just garish expressions of his own neuroses. David Sylvester and Michel Leiris, who both wrote perceptively about his work, emerged as friends and champions. As early as 1951, Sylvester asserted that Bacon was ‘the major English artist of his time’. He soon had access to Bacon’s studio and saw paintings before anyone ...”

“... chroniclers, including Crane Brinton, André Castelot, Jean Orieux and the French politician Michel Poniatowski (not to mention the prolific historian Louis Madelin, to whose 1944 effort an American publisher appended the subtitle ‘A Vivid Biography of the Amoral, Unscrupulous and Fascinating French Statesman’). For authority and learning, it will be ...”

“... papers, depositing various manuscripts with his financial adviser, Eugène Leiris – father of Michel – not all of which have come to light. By the time of his departure for Sicily, however, Roussel seems to have lost interest in his literary career. Though he tidied up many personal affairs, and drew up a new will, he left no instructions concerning the ...”

“... means structurally – why it can be so necessary. In ‘Literature Considered as a Bullfight’, Michel Leiris compares the writer to a toreador. Imagine a bullfight without the bull: it would be a set of aesthetic manoeuvres, pretty twirls and pirouettes and so on – but there’d be no danger. The bull, crucially, brings danger to the party, and for ...”

“... in 1934, in an essay published in Documents, the journal of the ‘dissident Surrealists’ around Georges Bataille, Magritte made a statement that also applies to many other works: ‘With few exceptions, it is a question of mises-en-scène, which give the illusion of contact with the real, but merely encounter the void.’ This thought leads to his fullest ...”

“... wayward teacher, ended up dining together regularly, and even going on to a nightclub. One night Michel, the DJ of Apocryphe, was found dying in the club toilets, having fractured his skull in a fall after an overdose, and the only way to hush things up was to dispose of the body in the septic tank and find a stand-in for the dead man. The crucial thing was ...”

“... But this materialism should not be confused with empiricism. On the contrary, it’s what Georges Bataille, in his ‘Critical Dictionary’, calls ‘base materialism’. For Bataille, the positivist materialism of science or the dialectical materialism of Marxism are nothing more than Christianity in disguise, and a philosophy grounded in them ...”

“... all paid for?’ And when his brother died in Indochina, Mme Simenon grieved thus: ‘What a pity, Georges, that it’s Christian who had to die.’ The residual need to please is sturdy. However, nothing in my personal or professional life pleased my mother as much as when Flaubert’s Parrot was nominated for the Booker Prize and a small photograph of her ...”

“... entourage, the last words about the ‘Algerian Republic’ especially. The Prime Minister, Michel Debré, told Morin that when he had read the text of the speech before it was recorded, the phrase about the ‘Algerian Republic’ had not been there. Debré protested and the General apologised, saying that he had been carried away, that the words had ...”