“... it.’ The task was to liberate the novel from the ‘tyranny of significations’, an idea that Susan Sontag soon lifted in Against Interpretation. Depth, character and humanism, as Robbe-Grillet saw it, were ‘obsolete notions’ that stood in the way of what Barthes called the pleasure of the text, and Sontag the ‘erotics of art’. Robbe-Grillet ...”

“... under his sack of boundary stones. They didn’t mutter curses as they fastened their wings And rose in widening farewell circles. They grieved for the garden growing smaller below them, Soon to exist only as a story That every day grows harder to believe. Carl Dennis, ‘Loss’ ‘Multitude’ is defined in Webster’s as ‘the state of being ...”

“... anything in the 1990s, yet between 2005 and 2008 prices soared: wheat and maize grown in the US rose by about 130 per cent; so did American soya, which goes mostly to animal feed. Dairy prices shot up (butter by 74 per cent, powdered milk by 69 per cent); the price of chicken went up by two-thirds. A month before the banking meltdown in 2008, ‘food ...”

“... and it’s true, the pint-sized Louise wasn’t exactly an oil painting. Having Susan Boyle eyebrows didn’t help. But she and Bernhardt – who studied sculpture with her (and achieved something rather more than mere amateur competence) – unquestionably had an amitié douce for life. Sometime in the late 1870s they posed for a ...”

“... The Siamese twins, without separating, get married. ‘Perhaps the scariest scene in Freaks,’ Susan Sontag writes in On Photography, ‘is the wedding banquet, when pinheads, bearded women, Siamese twins and living torsos dance and sing their acceptance of the wicked, normal-sized Cleopatra, who has just married the gullible midget hero.’ This ...”

“... bashing the naysaying reviewers as muckers, yahoos and ‘humpty-beaters’, strewing a rose petal path of compliments (‘a perfectly decent and honourable book very well written for much of its length’, ‘gifted with an agreeable variety of aperçus on matters such as status, class, privilege and clan’, ‘an interesting book, very ...”

“... seduced Emily Dickinson’s brother, Austin, 27 years her senior, and destroyed his marriage to Susan Gilbert, Emily’s closest confidante. Like any good seductress, Todd was an opportunist. She exploited Austin’s role as the treasurer of Amherst College to wangle her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a ...”

“... of rain, or at the end of Lewis’s The Last Battle, with poor old Narnia dark and broken and Susan, with her disgusting lipstick and her nylons, shut out. Sex happens because it has to happen: there wouldn’t be much of a human race without it. And the existence of sex acts like a sentry – like Milton’s cherubim at the gates of Eden – preventing ...”

“... nightly in cinema queues? What, indeed? ‘Aren’t we going to be told who everyone is?’ said Susan, looking around the room and smiling. Effects like these have little in common with the ways of Swann or the beaches of Balbec; let alone celluloid derivatives. Lastly, and in many ways most significantly for reception at large, there is a difference of ...”

“... bearskins, plumed helmets. The kitsch of Greater Romania under Carol’s rule qualifies for what Susan Sontag called ‘failed seriousness’: one visiting journalist who was granted an interview with the king was astonished to encounter an aide-de-camp in full military rig, ‘a Hollywood ensemble of bright blue and red, golden braid and tassels, and ...”