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“... while for others it is science, secularism, democracy, the death of God or the Holocaust. Susan Sontag thought the whole subject scarcely worth discussing, since in her view tragedy had never been central to Western theatre. Raymond Williams’s Modern Tragedy maintains that all the obituary notices are premature. The essays here on modern drama ...”

“... student Mary Woronov and, most notably, the vivacious and tragic Edie Sedgwick. (The exception was Susan Sontag, intimidating subject of seven Screen Tests, but never cast in a Warhol feature.) A Screen Test was, literally, a test. Warhol documented his subjects simply having what a Hindu might call their being – that is, coping with the odd ...”

“... between the two spheres. Such customising of images is close to ‘camp’ as defined by Susan Sontag. Alert to the queer dimension of this sensibility (her celebrated 1964 essay reads in part like a field report on the gay underground of Warhol, the filmmaker Jack Smith and others), Sontag saw camp as ...”

“... Several​ of the last century’s finest non-fiction writers – Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, James Baldwin – longed to be novelists. In interviews with the Paris Review, each touched on the tension and insecurity involved in their dual métier. Sontag wrote in surprisingly aspirational tones of ‘the novelist [I’d] finally given myself permission to be ...”

“... as a volume in 1988, and now expanded and updated to include Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison and Susan Sontag, Margaret Atwood remarks that the writers have been brought together ‘over what, in some cases, would be their dead bodies’. Dorothy Parker, for instance, says she is ‘a feminist, and God knows I’m loyal to my sex ... But when we paraded ...”

“... monster’. Salman Rushdie nominated him ‘International Moron of the Year’ for 1999. Susan Sontag said that there were many many people who would never pick up one of his books again. Presenting the matter in the starkest possible terms, the human rights worker and novelist Jonathan Littell remarked in 2008: When a family is sitting in its ...”

“... artists’ – among them Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Susan Sontag, Harold Brodkey and Robert Wilson – who kept their sexuality hidden from public view, something White views with antipathy: ‘We openly gay artists had to deal with the dismissive or condescending judgments all around us – “Of course ...”

“... The Melancholy of Resistance ‘a book about a world into which the Leviathan has returned’, and Susan Sontag saw it as ‘both an anatomy of desolation, desolation at its most appalling, and a stirring manual of resistance to desolation – through inwardness’. Such endorsements have about them the ring of good intentions, as well as truth, but the ...”

“... of stereotyping the south as a source of volatility. ‘Every culture has its southerners,’ Susan Sontag wrote, ‘people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, drink, sing, brawl, kill their unfaithful spouses.’ In Mesopotamia this was not an identity but a description of the unpredictable south-eastern ‘demon’ winds that blew ...”

“... having been the object of your attentions. It’s like nailing the proverbial jelly to the wall. Susan Sontag talks about him slipping through the net of comparisons. It’s perhaps not beside the point to recall that when a very young man, Walser wanted to be an actor, and while that ambition may have been squelched in the course of a typically ...”

“... illuminates the work for us. There is, of course, a temptingly easy connection between the two. As Susan Sontag has remarked, Arbus’s suicide, like Sylvia Plath’s, has become a kind of credential of sincerity. The death stands in for the compassion which the photographs can be said to lack. It has often been claimed, and is here claimed once more by ...”

“... so, in his way, Warhol predated all the pink thinkers on Camp sensibility. It would be 1964 before Susan Sontag emerged with her ‘Notes on Camp’, which read nowadays, in their arch solemnity, like some kind of ambush on the tendency itself, and which must be among the least effectively stylised pronouncements on the virtues of American ...”

“... disease) are finely felicitous at the opening of the Levet poem. In Illness as Metaphor Susan Sontag considers a degenerate usage: expressions like ‘the cancer of racism’ suggest that cancer sufferers are somehow affiliated with racists – ‘moral lepers’, you might (also hurtfully) say. Though peevishness is hardly a mortal ...”

“... the mass killings of Serbs in World War Two, they were supposed to hold their breath and wait for Susan Sontag or Bernard Henri Levy to take up their cause. It is important to understand that even if Mahatma Gandhi had been the President of Serbia there would still have been a Serbian problem to solve. Yugoslavia made sense for the simple reason that ...”

“... on us.’It would be a mistake to call Covid-19 nature’s revenge, except as a metaphor. As Susan Sontag argued, illness has no ‘meaning’, and interpreting it runs the risk of stigmatising its carriers – particularly if they can be depicted as in some way ‘other’: foreign, sexually ‘deviant’, non-white. Trump’s fulminations against ...”