“... Artaud, you become dependent on the past if only because you need to have it around to reject. As Paul de Man observed in his subtle essay ‘Literary History and Literary Modernity’, ‘the more radical the rejection of anything that came before, the greater the dependence on the past.’* What blurs these continuities is the fact that in the natural ...”

“... In 1890, the neo-Impressionist Paul Signac offered to paint Félix Fénéon, the very coiner, four years previously, of the term ‘neo-Impressionist’. The critic-subject responded with modest evasiveness, and then a proviso: ‘I will express only one opinion: effigy absolutely full-face – do you agree?’ Signac did not agree ...”

“... detailing the history of poetry from Baudelaire to himself via Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Valéry, Tzara and André Breton. The meeting led to the publication of two books in 1947: Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique, a polemical anthology which includes Isou’s ‘Larmes de jeune fille’, and a semi-autobiographical ...”

“... view claiming we can get past such limitations. ‘Perhaps a perfect interpretation would, as Valéry said of pure reality, stop the heart. Good enough interpretation is what encourages or enables certain necessary forms of attention.’ This modest assertion, which justifies literary industry by its distinction between interpretation, a constant ...”

“... Is a late death, however, ever late enough? Is there ever a right time to die? According to Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste, there is a time to let go with equanimity: ‘The natural or true death would be the total exhaustion of the possibilities of the system of an individual man. All the inner combinations of his capacities, incomplete in ...”

“... most extended and schematic exorcism of history and mythology. The poem is – to borrow Paul Zweig’s phrase for ‘Song of Myself’ – a ‘therapeutic epic’. Each of its main characters represents an unfortunate aspect of the West Indian inheritance which, as the poem progresses, is either cured or comfortably accommodated. Philoctete, for ...”

“... is worth nothing if it doesn’t cost too much. When he discovered that his theologian friend Paul Elmer More didn’t believe in hell, he was indignant and wrote: ‘Is your God some kind of Santa Claus?’ This morality literally erupts in two letters in the volume, producing moments of shock amid an otherwise totally absorbing (perhaps I mean ...”

“... precocious interest in French Symbolist poetry, in particular the work of Mallarmé, Verlaine and Valéry, set him apart from his fellow pupils at Kimberley’s Christian Brothers College. In his late teens a chance conversation with the philosopher J.N. Findlay, whom he met on a cruise ship, inspired him to abandon the architecture course on which he had ...”

“... Mitterrand supported the murderous Hutu regime in Rwanda partly because the Tutsi leader, Paul Kagame, was a protégé of Yoweri Museveni, the president of (English-speaking) Uganda; he feared that victory for Kagame would mean an expansion of Anglo-American influence throughout the Great Lakes region. Sure enough, when Kagame won he broke links with ...”

“... von Hulewicz. The whole letter is a post-Shelleyan defence of poetry, though I am persuaded by Paul de Man’s Allegories of Reading that there is a deconstructive motive in Rilke, too. The only point I would think of adding to Keach’s description is that the crisis for Shelley’s style always comes when desire has to be embodied. Bloom has remarked ...”

“... of such belief are open to view in the poetry. Like several of his contemporaries, including Valéry, Yeats and Eliot, Rilke is a modern poet in search of a myth, while aware that the ancient myths have been reduced to potsherds and that new ones look like ersatz (what he was not aware of was that contemporary politicians, too, would be interested in the ...”

“... Roland​ Barthes met Valéry Giscard d’Estaing on 9 December 1976 at a lunch hosted by Edgar Faure, the president of the National Assembly, at the Hôtel de Lassay. Michel Foucault had turned down Faure’s invitation as a protest against Giscard’s failure to put an end to the death penalty, and the left-wing figures who went anyway were later subjected, Barthes’s biographer Louis-Jean Calvet reports, to sarcastic inquiries such as ‘So, how was the soup?’ Barthes didn’t like being sneered at for consorting with a patrician representative of the centre-right, and his friends made it known that he had, over coffee, made pointedly Marxisant small talk: he’s said to have asked Giscard if he favoured the withering away of the state, and Giscard is said to have replied: ‘Why not?’ The sneers continued all the same, and when, a little over three years later, Jack Lang invited Barthes to lunch with François Mitterrand, Barthes worried that accepting would be viewed as a craven attempt to make amends ...”

“... second husband, Jacques Charrier, were violently at odds, barricaded in their flat on the avenue Paul-Doumer, hoping to avoid the scrutiny of the press. On one of the rare occasions Bardot left the building, she was on a stretcher. The story seems to be that Charrier was off his head (he was also trying to avoid military service in Algeria on mental health ...”

“... a skeleton’s life,/As a questioner about reality,/A countryman of all the bones in the world?’Paul Mariani’s unfortunate achievement is to take a life that was threatened by abstraction, paper and dysphoria anyway, and make it seem still more unreal, papery and dysphoric; think, by contrast, with what brilliant detail and ordinary humanity we are now ...”

“... 1992. Journalists have been targeted in Moscow – Listev in 1995, Yuri Shchekochikhin in 2003, Paul Klebnikov in 2004, Anastasia Baburova in 2009 – and the North Caucasus: Natalia Estemirova’s abduction and murder in 2009 was only one of many. In 1996, Viktor Mikhailov, a crime reporter for Zabaikalsky rabochy, was beaten to death in broad daylight in ...”