“... 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 ...”

“... Mallarmé than Freud in their syntax, or Derrida’s Glas, with its double-columned interlacing of Genet and Hegel, represent extreme forms of this strategy. But Foucault’s oracular gestures, mingling echoes of Artaud and Bossuet, Lévi-Strauss’s Wagnerian constructions, Barthes’s eclectic coquetries, belong to the same register. To understand this ...”

“... I could, the taste of my own life,’ she wrote at the very end of Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. Genet said that knowing more about her life had given her ‘more density’; Sartre said that her autobiographical books, particularly A Very Easy Death, about the last six weeks of her mother’s life, were the best things she’d written. She ‘communicates ...”

“... law, an ideal against an established order of power. The modern homme révolté, an Artaud or a Genet, sets against the order of power the truth of lawlessness. The solitude of difference, of an inner life more than the reflections of other lives, is similarly historical.In most of the writings on this subject, the emphasis is put on the first two ...”