“... to the official view, independent thought was the pathetic pastime of a few outliers like Susan Sontag, who had the temerity to ask: ‘Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilisation” or “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... serious writing in English about Godard came from the Sixties – from Richard Roud, Manny Farber, Susan Sontag, Robin Wood, Raymond Durgnat and others. This reflected Godard’s much greater cultural centrality during that period and also his apparently secure place within the festival and art film system. When Godard veered off-course with the Dziga ...”

“... who brought her own version of the American dream to the new country. Like Simone de Beauvoir or Susan Sontag, she would become famous not for particular books, but for herself in general, as a cipher, a public intellectual. Someone has perhaps already designed the wallpaper on their computer, a repeating pattern of potato-prints: turban, Mallen ...”

“... over from Britain ‘the colonial position of an occupying power’. (A year later, she urged Susan Sontag not to accept the Jerusalem Prize.) Bannerman is, in his own words, a ‘conservationist’. This makes him, in part, a throwback to Gordimer’s 1974 novel of that title, a negative pastoral focused on Mehring, a dissociated, nihilistic, white ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... mind: what he called, in its raw, ‘unspoiled’ state, ‘la pensée sauvage’. Lévi-Strauss, Susan Sontag claimed in 1963, had ‘invented the profession of the anthropologist as a total occupation’. Whether it was anthropology at all is debatable; that it was a remarkable effort to ask the Big Questions is not. Leach grudgingly conceded that ...”

“... hostage-trading partners in Iran responsible for any attacks ‘against American interests’? As Susan Sontag said at the PEN meeting held in New York: ‘We found this particularly maddening, since from the very beginning fundamental American interests were at stake: our Constitutional rights to write, publish, sell, buy and read books free of ...”

“... desert, sky, sun and, above all, the sea, the ‘call of life and an invitation to death’. As Susan Sontag wrote in a 1963 essay, he ‘is at his best when he disburdens himself of the baggage of existential culture … and speaks in his own person’. In Travels in the Americas, he does so with unusual intimacy.Camus made his first and only trip to ...”

“... tradition of revolutionary intellectuals, but Said doesn’t resemble Gramsci or Fanon so much as Susan Sontag, born two years before him, and, like him, a dissident heir of the New York intellectuals. Both were literary critics who first made a name for themselves as interpreters of French theory for Anglo-American audiences but later broke free of its ...”

“... intrude on your privacy, but we’re both wearing your underpants.’ Calvin Klein is sitting with Susan Sontag. Actually he isn’t but if he were it would sum up what celebrity means in New York.22 May. Watch the second programme in the BBC2 series It’s Not Unusual, in which gays and lesbians, many in their seventies and eighties, recall their ...”