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“... 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 ...”

“... of their East Hampton hammocks signing up biographies of high-profile authors such as Saul Bellow, Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer (three thus far, along with a memoir by one of his former wives, with other exes waiting in the wings to take their whacks). The irony is that publishers seem more eager to bring out books about golden-oldie authors than books ...”

“... spiritual exaltation neutralises any likelihood of a sensuous response: a bravura display of what Susan Sontag calls metapornography. It has a metallic cool that suggests containment of incandescent intensities, like refrigerators that use heat to keep cold: the interactions of hot and cold in erotic literature come up for discussion in Régine ...”

“... of what the beautiful ought to be (but see Roger Scruton, below). To be sure, both Baudrillard and Susan Sontag have recommended something like a diet cure for images: that we try to be reasonable and reduce our intake, to fast once in a while perhaps, and exercise other senses. Yet this is pre-eminently an addictive society, and of all conceivable ...”

“... emblem of private reflection, the sign that the subject is most himself? Or herself: here are Susan Sontag (1972) and Carson McCullers (1946), each raising a dark gaze to us under a brow tense with thought each reaching to poise a cigarette over an ashtray. Giacometti (1961) stares nose-to-nose into the face of a bust he has made, his big foreground ...”

“... an infinity of meaning and sweetness into the smallest spaces’. In a piece for the LRB in 1987, Susan Sontag also commented on Wagner’s ‘extraordinary delicacy’, his willingness to be ‘overwhelmingly intimate with audiences’. The underrated English-language Valkyrie staged at English National Opera last year exemplified this trend. A fresh ...”

“... up their photograph?’Although over the years his work has found fans in Beckett, Sartre and Susan Sontag, and although Poil de carotte was a set text in French schools into the 1960s, Renard remains a minor interest among Anglophone audiences. His wife, Marie, cut a third of the journal after his death in 1910; once she’d finished editing it for ...”

“... in March 2003, winning praise from Margaret Atwood (‘All readers should read it’) and Susan Sontag (‘I was enthralled and moved’). It stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 117 weeks and has been translated into 32 languages. Its popularity created a market for Iranian women’s memoirs, which still spill, inevitably blurbed by ...”

“... cults of Kafka, existentialism and human rights, and in the writings of Dwight Macdonald and Susan Sontag. Thomist theologians were as much a part of it as New York’s Jewish intellectuals. ‘Man,’ Greif writes, ‘became at mid-century the figure everyone insisted must be addressed, recognised, helped, rescued, made the centre, the measure, the ...”

“... in which everyone suffers terribly and/or dies. That the other blurbs come from Roberto Bolaño, Susan Sontag and Paul Auster indicates that Kleist at last achieved the fame he longed for in his lifetime. In 2013, there was even a big budget film version – Age of Uprising – starring Mads Mikkelsen at his most weatherbeaten. This is the seventh ...”

“... sceptical about this too. Her diary for 9 November 1890 documented inviting over the mind-curer Susan Bowles for some ‘fun’. ‘She bade me shut my eyes,’ Alice recorded, ‘and say over to myself: “I am a child of God and as such pure, perfect and without flaw!” My mind of course began skipping about the horizon.’ As ever, Alice, like the girl ...”

“... will be familiar to readers of biographies of Rich’s contemporaries – Sylvia Plath, say, or Susan Sontag or Helen Frankenthaler. But the cascade of good fortune that poured down on the ambitious young Adrienne unsettles even her biographer: ‘Had she asked a judge or committee for the moon in those days, who knows but she wouldn’t have come home ...”

“... he had killed him with his camera just as surely as Loan had killed the prisoner with his gun. Susan Sontag claimed that the event was staged, that Loan deliberately led the man out into the street where he knew the journalists were waiting. Did he want the picture to be taken to show what happened to the enemy during the particularly tense time of ...”

“... of compassion, comprehension and success. ‘Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship,’ Susan Sontag wrote, ‘in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.’ John Donne believed that illness is the kingdom, that it steals in and corrupts our lives: ‘The disease hath established a Kingdome, an Empire in mee, and will have ...”