“... the despair, the sense of her own uniqueness, are all commonplaces of the addict experience. Roland Barthes imagined the paranoiac as someone who would ‘produce complicated texts, stories developed like arguments, constructions posited like games, like secret complaints’. This is what Kavan bequeathed – a living tissue, of lies, of truths, of ...”

“... the sorting centre, I found myself noticing all the plastic littering the drains and kerbsides. Roland Barthes, in one of his moments of reverie, described plastic as ‘the very idea [of] infinite transformation … impregnated throughout with this wonder’. But the plastic I could see was only impregnated with mud and Lucozade. When I got home, I ...”

“... could admire each other’s turnout? And truly magnificent some of these thoroughbreds were; Roland Barthes thought cars ‘almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals, the supreme creation of an era’ (which might have been better said of the splendid ocean liners of the day). In the highest class came the Bugatti Royale, a car for ...”

“... might well prefer to hear that their plots are unconvincing than that their syntax is inelegant. Roland Barthes speaks of literary style as plunging to the depths of the body, which makes it sound as personal as one’s internal organs. Perhaps we need a psychology of style to know the reason a writer is averse to certain sounds and rhythms and ...”

“... a painter who used a lot of handwriting on his canvases. Critics were provoked by this and Roland Barthes wrote an essay about it in The Responsibility of Forms. ‘How to draw a line that is not stupid’ is a question he asks in the essay. How to draw a line that is not stupid: isn’t this one of our big problems as humans? Whether I am me or ...”

“... an argument from the French avant-garde writers and philosophers of the Sixties and Seventies – Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Sollers – who made Bataille into a veritable cult hero. What appealed to these theorists were the contradictions and paradoxes of Bataille’s life and work: the fragmentary nature of his writing, the deliberately ...”

“... by sharing his privileged status with charm and good humour’. Henderson introduced Hamilton to Roland Penrose and Lee Miller, the power couple who both supported the IG and exposed Hamilton to Duchamp – most importantly, to The Green Box, the book of notes detailing the making of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23), a.k.a. The Large ...”

“... is Just to Say’. Theories of Structuralism make Gribble particularly angry. He quotes a bit from Roland Barthes only to say he finds it impenetrable. A long paragraph from Culler’s Structuralist Poetics he regards as ‘woolly rhapsodising’. He quotes in silence a passage from J. Hillis Miller as if it spoke nonsense for itself. But Gribble ...”

“... this intimate a ‘painting degree zero’ in line with the ‘writing degree zero’ posed by Roland Barthes against Sartrean commitment at around this time? ‘I can’t imagine my work being used to accomplish anything socially,’ Johns said. This is less negation than neutrality à la Barthes, for whom ‘the ...”

“... the accidental into the service of the non-accidental. It deploys random details to create what Roland Barthes calls a ‘reality effect’, and in doing so reinforces an overall sense of necessity. The Portrait of a Lady tells us that Ralph Touchett accompanies Henrietta Stackpole to look at the pictures in the long gallery of his father’s country ...”

“... in the olla podrida of daily habit. In January 1969 he meets at the French Institute in London Roland Barthes: ‘a good-looking man, alert and conversible. The trouble with these structuralists is that, having discovered a new way of looking at language, they believe that language now IS what they say about it and nothing else, whereas it is that in ...”

“... paroxysmic self-implosion (the great comic catalogue of ‘bêtise’ being Bouvard et Pécuchet). Roland Barthes famously put this way of reading Flaubert on the map, and it is still immensely serviceable. But this should not be allowed to obscure the fact that, beyond the sophisticated paradoxes, Flaubert could be just as straightforwardly ...”

“... came to him out of the blue while he was watching a baseball game, the United States had been what Roland Barthes called Japan, back in 1970, an ‘empire of signs’, a place where signifiers floated loose from their signifieds. He says that his America was a virtual reality, he pieced it together in his head in Kobe, where the secondhand bookshops were ...”

“... sporadic, whereas for Postmodernism it is impossible to open your mouth without quoting. As Roland Barthes and others have pointed out, the phrase ‘I love you’ is always a citation, indeed one of the most shopsoiled citations of all, even when it is sincerely meant. For the romantically inclined, this opens up an ominous gap between experience ...”

“... also in her practical take on the intellectual life, such as her description of spending time with Roland Barthes and Dionys Mascolo from Gallimard: They talked about civil war as one talks about a visit to the dentist. When they came to discussing how to make efficient bombs out of bottles with petrol, I could have knocked their heads together with ...”