“... ideals, she says, in work or love, only obedience to the will of others. Her lover (Claude, Eric, Jacques over the years) set up the venues and kept watch as men held her splayed against walls or on floors while they made use of her. She consciously performs – is performed on – for the pleasure that her lover takes in watching her being used and for the ...”

“... against him without feeling any guilt? She replaced love of God with another sort, for her cousin Jacques, whom she thought of as something like le grand Meaulnes. Jacques, older, better read and willing to take her to bars, would disappear for weeks on end, and Simone, now studying philosophy at the Sorbonne (the École ...”

“... his being kept there.) It was difficult to know what would interest Althusser. When the historian Jacques Le Goff, then a fellow normalien, came back from Prague and spoke about the Communist takeover, Althusser did not stop to listen, yet he wished endlessly to discuss British policy in Palestine with me. There was always something unpredictable about his ...”

“... But then Breton was hardly innocent of the market either; he bought and sold art for the couturier Jacques Doucet (Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was one purchase) and traded on his own superb collection of tribal art as well.Influence comes through dissemination, which is sometimes assisted rather than impeded by the harshest of historical realities. The ...”

“... English film journal Screen, in which the advanced thoughts of Marx, Freud, Althusser and Lacan are brought to bear on film-texts. Much of Screen can be fairly called joyless reading for those who like films, but its awe-inspiring insistence on the pervasiveness of the ‘dominant ideology’ and its puritanical emphasis on the capitalistic ...”

“... I cannot stomach them’. He also managed, perhaps unintentionally, to invent a new Frenchman: Jacques Nerrida. What Empson found disgusting was the quest, as he saw it, for complexity for complexity’s sake, a project that was ‘always pretending to be plumbing the very depths’ but in reality was only congratulating itself on its cleverness. Above all ...”

“... default – ‘the sinister continuity between the 14 years of François Mitterrand and the 12 of Jacques Chirac, united by their talent for winning elections and ruining France’ – by Nicolas Baverez, an economist and historian of the centre-right. Rebuttals, vindications, rejoinders, alternatives have proliferated. Baverez looks at first glance like a ...”

“... both. It does helpfully identify a number of stars in the recent Paris sky, so that Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Blanchot, Greimas and others are all placed in a kind of orbit around Barthes. Lavers is not much taken with what she sees as the temporary mindlessness of Barthes’s next-to-last works, and she is more persuasive ...”

“... Wright and Chester Himes. He was also reading Jaspers, Nietzsche, Hegel, Bergson, Bachelard and Lacan – the ‘logician of madness’, he called him, partly in jest. He dreaded the ‘larval, stocky, obsolete life that awaits me once I’ve finished my studies. I don’t want “marriage”, children, a home, the family table.’ Fanon explored these ...”