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“... there is nothing wrong with it. In one of her last books, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Susan Sontag discussed the ethical complications of looking at ‘extreme’ images – in Sontag’s case, still photographs of war, the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing. Sontag rejected the ...”

“... of a cranky, uneven, occasionally pretentious kind. His work has always divided opinion. For every Susan Sontag hailing him as ‘the most exciting new American writer to appear in years’, there was an Irving Howe slapping him down: ‘Reading this collection prompts one to wish that Leonard Michaels had never heard of alienation, sentiment of ...”

“... the book is not pornography. It sets out to make sex smaller than it seems to be, whereas what Susan Sontag calls literary pornography contrives to do the opposite. In Story of the Eye, as in most erotic work, there is an underlying rage against inescapable loss, a nihilism that comes from the knowledge of the impermanence of flesh and ...”

“... writing this ‘half-arsed book’. If writers need to be ‘interested in everything’ – as Susan Sontag once said – when do they ever get time off? Loafing, getting stoned, hanging about on sun-kissed café terraces: for most people, such things are rare, and about the best that life can offer (Dyer also writes, frequently and unruffledly, about ...”

“... hope he’d get over it. ‘Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists,’ as Susan Sontag wrote in Regarding the Pain of Others, ‘has not reached moral or psychological adulthood. No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia.’ In The Pregnant ...”

“... in a ‘Cossack minidress’, she tried to bamboozle her way into Partisan Review by imitating Susan Sontag); and, eventually, in the feminist academy (where her Princeton colleague Ann Douglas – ‘a rebel, a genius, a flash of light’ in a ‘green Diane Von Furstenberg wrap-dress’ – became an idol). Heroine-worship, in other words, is a real ...”

“... and that his learning was quite amazing. But who does it help or amuse to know now that he thought Susan Sontag was boring and pretentious, or that Levin was pompous and pedantic, or that Hellman’s plays suffer from the fact that she doesn’t often enough portray a Jewish family? The notebooks are full of this kind of ill-considered back-biting, with ...”

“... was only obtainable through killing. This was the time of the gun-to-camera transition. As Susan Sontag observes, ‘when we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures.’ Akeley believed that the camera couldn’t be deceived. An exact image of nature insures against time and disappearance, and it is more real than the ...”

“... a woman, beauty must often be a more alienating and tainted gift than it appears to her admirers. Susan Sontag has complained that in our culture beauty, defined as ‘woman’s business’, has been made ‘the theatre of their enslavement’. This perhaps values too lightly what beauty gives its owner: provided, of course, that intellectual or moral ...”

“... Vietnam experience in terms of a sinister illness, could almost be subtitled, with apologies to Susan Sontag, ‘Vietnam and its Metaphors’. In their attempt to answer the intractable ‘why’ of the massacre, Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim sense that the contributory factors they painstakingly assemble don’t quite amount to a reason, and reach for ...”

“... isn’t Nunez, who once came out with a neatly balanced judgment on her own self-serious mentor, Susan Sontag: When, recently, I see that Javier Marías has said that the worst thing a writer can do is to take himself or his work too seriously, I think I understand. I think I even agree with him. I think if I had thought this way myself when I was ...”

“... during the 1960s, few English-speakers were in a position to notice much difference. Even Susan Sontag, who praised Honda’s films in an essay, ‘The Imagination of Disaster’, had little to say about Godzilla: she was more taken with Rodan (1956), in which a giant pterodactyl shames its pursuers by killing itself for love. Rodan wasn’t the ...”

“... novelists and writers over the age of 70: Vidal, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Arthur Schlesinger, Susan Sontag and Joan Didion among them. Jaundiced about American good intentions, unaffected by the roar of sentimentality after 9/11, they saw what armies of better informed, younger journalists couldn’t or refused to see. ‘The line between liberating ...”

“... addition to Bradbury’s invented personages the conferees include Martin Amis, Günter Grass and Susan Sontag (she skips one of the later conferences in the narrative, on the grounds that there is something more interesting going on in Northern Italy). Bradbury’s Villa Barolo is funded by the American Magno Foundation – offspring of an empire ...”

“... has been written about Serge’s life, first and foremost in his own Memoirs of a Revolutionary. Susan Weissman provided a meticulous account in Victor Serge: A Political Biography, published in 2001. Born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich in Brussels in 1890, Serge was the son of poverty-stricken intellectuals who had fled tsarist Russia. The family name itself was ...”