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“... he said. The ‘tests’ – whose subjects include John Ashbery, Lou Reed, Dennis Hopper and Susan Sontag – were shot on 100-foot rolls of black and white film at 24 frames per second, then screened, almost slo-mo, at 16 fps. The results varied: Lou Reed, who had studied drama, brings a Coke bottle as a prop and wears dark shades, so we can’t ...”

“... and dying stylishly. Ivan Noble, a BBC science and technology writer; Tom Lubbock, art critic; Susan Sontag, although not exactly a diary, mined her cancer for a famous essay about the cultural nature of illness. Those stood out, they were all professional writers and most wrote their diaries as occasional or regular series for newspapers or online ...”

“... a volley probably directed at the Surrealist Charles Henri Ford. Twenty years before Susan Sontag insisted that the camp sensibility had ‘hardly broken into print’, Duncan was arguing in print that the time for camp was over. In the name of gay rights, and in line with his universalist instincts, Duncan suggested that the appropriate ...”

“... the censorship system began. No Irish writer was banned after Lee Dunne in 1976, though books by Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes and Angela Carter were banned in the 1980s, which is strange, because that’s when I read them all. In 1979 information about contraception became legal, though you couldn’t legally buy condoms without a prescription until ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to the point that Dorothy Parker, Julie Burchill and Muriel Spark, with the occasional addition of Susan Sontag, often seem to be the only women writers on whom they seem willing to hang the epithet ‘clever’. But that is a different and darker matter.) Feminism alone, in short, doesn’t stop Muriel Spark’s vision of cursed femininity from being ...”

“... Alistair Cooke, Jessica Mitford, Margaret Atwood, Paul Theroux, Fay Weldon, Harold Bloom, Susan Sontag, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Dwight Bolinger, Elizabeth Traugott and many more). What is revealing is how the panel’s response to certain types of usage has changed between 1969, the date of the first survey, and ...”

“... as friends, rather than passing acquaintances, are Marguerite Yourcenar, Christopher Isherwood, Susan Sontag and Francis Ford Coppola (among several interesting photographs is one of Richie beside a gawky, 19-year-old Sofia Coppola, who looks thoroughly lost). He knew Ozu and Kurosawa, and wrote books about their work. Then there were the pioneers of ...”

“... of practitioners, but Dillon’s responsiveness is wide, to Virginia Woolf, to William Gass, to Susan Sontag, to Lester Bangs and to Roland Barthes (his first and most important inspiration). Most practitioners regard essay-writing as a sideline – Davenport set store by his stories, so much less vital than his non-fictional prose – but Dillon sees ...”

“... Lowell had been spiteful about Hardwick’s literary aspirations. ‘I love Lizzie,’ he told Susan Sontag in 1962, but ‘one can’t have one’s wife writing Madame Bovary in the kitchen.’ (He was making a pass at Sontag at the time.)The collections of essays that followed Sleepless Nights, Bartleby in ...”

“... with women (Arlette Farge was a favourite), he didn’t like socialising with them; once I invited Susan Sontag to dinner and he hissed at me when she left the room for a moment: ‘Why did you invite her?’ He preferred all-male evenings, preferably with talented youths such as Jacques Almira (whose first novel he introduced), Gilles Barbedette (to whom ...”

“... even into the work of a Rothko or a Pollock (Lavender Mist, Shimmering Substance). Why, as Susan Sontag once asked, ‘must a work of art restrict sentimental intervention and emotional participation, which are functions of closeness, in order to be just that – a work of art?’ We can have our doubts about the Modernist ...”

“... some may still feel Empire and Multitude to be on their side, allied to democracy and the left. Susan Sontag wrote that ‘an idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may serve the needs of the spirit.’ But unfortunately, spiritual needs are served here by adventures onto a terrain already occupied by ...”

“... they had written, or get them a foundation grant, and now they’ve gone to some other party for Susan Sontag. This is unfair, but no excuse for a Lear-like rage, a howling on the blasted heath. Friends are fickle, enemies are for ever, and the face in the mirror every morning fades to parchment. Now, at the age of 87, Podhoretz is an even older ...”

“... not feel it yet. Might not know it yet, except you did. ‘A new class of lifetime pariahs’, Susan Sontag called them in Aids and Its Metaphors: ‘the future ill’. The artist and film-maker Derek Jarman remembered his HIV diagnosis, in 1986: I thought: this is not true, then I realised the enormity. I had been pushed into yet another corner, this ...”