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“... In the spring​ of 1961, Frantz Fanon wrote to his publisher in Paris to suggest that he ask Jean-Paul Sartre for a preface to his anti-colonial manifesto, The Wretched of the Earth. ‘Tell him that every time I sit down at my desk, I think of him.’ For revolutionary intellectuals in the Third World, Sartre seemed miraculously uncontaminated by the paternalism – and hypocrisy – that gave the white left such a bad reputation ...”

“... us that ‘he truly was – even more, say, than one of the great social pariahs of our own time, Jean Genet – an outlaw.’ Peter Robb is well aware that it was Caravaggio’s detractors – and chiefly the great theorist and critic Bellori – who associated the dark, dirt and violence of his character and deeds with the subjects and style of his ...”

“... he befriended a thief called Benny Barnett, who taught him to steal cars and introduced him to Jean Lucinda Johnson, a precocious 16-year-old whose ‘skin was the warm reddish brown of a perfectly roasted turkey breast the moment it comes from the oven’. She would become his first wife. Himes quit college at 17, and began to pack a .44 calibre ...”

“... explored the roots of her own subculture, and the roots of those roots too: Burroughs took her to Genet, who took her to the French and anti-French traditions, both homegrown and that of the anti-colonial resistance. Rage, political and personal, took her yet further, to the assassins of 12th-century Persia, the nihilists of 19th-century Russia. I could go ...”

“... Abu Omar. (He was killed in mysterious circumstances in 1976.) Mikhaïl in turn introduced him to Jean Genet, ‘a very strange bird given to long scary silences’.While in Beirut, Said immersed himself in the work of Ibn Khaldun, whose 1377 study of history, the Muqaddimah, became nearly as important to him as Vico’s New Science, and received his ...”

“... his Critique of Pure Reason as encompassing all the interests of his reason, were also those which Jean-Paul Sartre pursued throughout his life, however different he intended his answers to be from those of Kant. Few thinkers in our time have pressed these questions with Sartre’s perseverence and imagination: but his subtle exploration of the first question ...”

“... She evokes the passion for justice displayed by the young protagonist of Proust’s Jean Santeuil in the weirdly coloured moral climate of late 19th-century France. She has some fine pages on La Revue blanche, a literary magazine that became a staunch and lucid defender of the principles sabotaged by the continued prosecution of Dreyfus ...”

“... a scene from a novel by Elizabeth Bowen, or a short story by Somerset Maugham, expanded to include Genet, The Story of O and comic books. Evans and Thornton spend some time analysing the feminist position on femininity, and here the disapproving tones of 15th-century Venetian officials find odd echoes: the Women’s Liberation Movement’s protest against the ...”

“... of his influences on a piece of graph paper: alongside art school idols – Artaud, Wittgenstein, Genet – are the names Samo and Jenny Holzer. Samo was the invention of Jean-Michel Basquiat and his classmate Al Diaz, who together placed cryptic statements in prominent SoHo locations: ‘SAMO AS A CONGLOMERATE OF DORMANT ...”

“... as they glided through the glittering throng, ‘I’ve been longing to ask you about the writer Jean Genet.’ ‘Ah,’ said the president. ‘Oui.’ The ‘Marseillaise’ and the national anthem made for a pause in the proceedings, but when they had taken their seats Her Majesty turned to the president and resumed. ‘Homosexual and jailbird, was ...”

“... would trade all of Being and Nothingness and the now unreadable Roads to Freedom for Saint Genet and What is Literature?). Dealings within the Family were perennially intricate, fraught, balletic. Maybe Beauvoir’s relations with Olga and others were actively lesbian, maybe they weren’t. Later on she vigorously denied it, but reading what she wrote ...”

“... of a number of French writers, to his own purposes. A clear example would be the borrowing from Genet of the device of two parallel, critically-related columns of text, which becomes the dominant form of Glas and is already anticipated in Dissemination by the embedding of Mallarmé’s ‘Mimique’ in Plato’s Philebus which launches the second ...”

“... or the Catholics and bourgeois who occupy a vague middle ground in French society – did not Genet describe Sartre as ‘l’emmerdeur de la bourgeoisie’? But at his death a great variety of French people vied with each other in praise of his intelligence, honesty, courage and vitality. The comparison with Voltaire was common (although Althusser ...”

“... like busy cabin stewardesses, ‘never at rest a moment or two’. Kinnell is better; so is Jean Calais (Pick Pocket, 1976), who writes out the wind altogether and simply has the corpses pecked by ‘crows and shrikes’. Jean Calais – a pseudonym for Stephen Rodefer – is Villon’s most interesting ...”

“... failed to arrive. In the US, where he’d once enjoyed a cultish notoriety alongside Beckett and Genet, Robbe-Grillet was now to be found in second-hand bookshops. Passionately anti-clerical, a self-confessed sadist, Robbe-Grillet had always relished his unofficial title, the ‘pope of the nouveau roman’, but now the joke was wearing thin: no one wants to ...”