“... like a script editor for The Simpsons who’d briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault.’ But it turned out she could be some writers some of the time. Her second novel, The Autograph Man, suggested she’d been steeping in Bellow and Roth. To Wood, she still sounded too much like Wallace, and his review, in this paper, was harsh enough ...”

“... and hiatuses. Grafton is not at all keen on the Renaissance episteme (he prefers a later Foucault from the History of Sexuality), so those of us who have ignorantly succumbed to its appeal had better think again. But if his present hero, Girolamo Cardano, is representative of 16th-century thinking, there might be something in the idea. Like Leonardo ...”

“... the Faculty in São Paulo: Lévi-Strauss, Braudel, Pierre Monbeig, Roger Bastide, Claude Lefort, Michel Foucault. The deepest local imprint was left in philosophy, where a set of outstanding instructors trained a generation of thinkers, vividly memorialised in a recent work by Paulo Eduardo Arantes as Um Departamento Francês de Ultramar. By the late ...”

“... deported, and murdered en route to Auschwitz. According to Deleuze’s friend the novelist Michel Tournier, Deleuze’s parents ‘created a veritable cult around Georges’, for which Gilles never forgave them. A sickly, asthmatic boy, he grew his nails long because of a skin disease which left his fingertips painful to the touch, and he wore a scarf ...”

“... At the time of Vichy, Robbe-Grillet was in Paris at the National Institute of Agronomy (which Michel Houellebecq, who found his work ‘indigestible’, would attend).* Unable to return to Brest, he ended up in Nuremberg as a forced labourer assembling Panzer tanks. He had never questioned his parents’ support for Pétain and found the war a shattering ...”

“... anti-disciplinary and anti-psychiatric, these tracts anticipate positions later taken by Foucault, Laing and Cooper, Deleuze and Guattari, and today’s prison abolition movement. In his great essay on Surrealism from 1929 Walter Benjamin too underscored its anarchistic dimension. The Surrealists were ‘the first to liquidate the sclerotic ...”

“... also bear witness to the truly exceptional quantity of critical writing on him, from Beauvoir to Foucault, to Blanchot, to Lacan, to Bataille, to Barthes, to Deleuze, to Philippe Sollers. These national celebrations have been surprising for several reasons. Sade was jailed by all three French governments under which he lived and each of his erotic works was ...”

“... not only with psychoanalytic colleagues but in wider intellectual circles. Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Philippe Sollers, Paul Ricoeur and Louis Althusser are all part of Lacan and Co. Like the analysts, each of them had to take a stand for or against Lacan. Lacan would have it no other way. He charged intellectual ...”

“... more likely to decide not to, ‘it will be as a thinker and demoraliser.’ In his new biography, Michel Winock is inclined to dismiss this as juvenile posturing, yet his generous quotation from notes and letters written throughout Flaubert’s life shows a remarkable continuity of attitude. From infancy to death Flaubert would condemn the world in much the ...”

“... Gregory Mazurovsky, Richard Foreman, Kate Manheim, Louis and Zuka Mittelberg, Bruno Marcenac, Michel Loriod, Maurice Roche), he now can see that all the high-flown references he had barely understood – to Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan – were no more than intellectualising flim-flammery, rehashed versions of ...”

“... from the anti-psychiatrists Laing, David Cooper, Jean Oury, Félix Guattari and Thomas Szasz, to Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman. The major studies of asylum culture by Szasz, Foucault and Goffman were all published in 1961. It was a zeitgeist, and it soon changed the way institutions were thought about inside the ...”

“... at Gary’s un-French origins by censuring his verb conjugations, and the avant-garde preferred Michel Butor. But the book sold well – like a lot of Gary’s output it’s said never to have been out of print in France – and Gary did a good job of using the press attention to lodge his public persona in the national consciousness. As a celebrity Gary ...”

“... disheartening that such simplistic oppositions are still being put forward half a century after Foucault examined the constructedness of all social contexts and knowledge categories; or, indeed, a century and a half after Nietzsche unmasked truth itself as no more than ‘a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms … a sum of human relations ...”

“... and Punish or bits of the Ecrits, it was no longer a mark of the blackest reaction to allow that Foucault was impressionistic with facts or that Lacan manifested cult-leaderish tendencies. The academic careers to be built on theory had largely been built; the hardest-core young Derridean among our teachers later drifted off into management consultancy and ...”

“... to understand the other; in L’Afrique fantôme, for example, we learn far more about its author, Michel Leiris, than we do about Africa. Contemporary exhibitions such as Surrealism beyond Borders at Tate Modern and Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists since 1940 at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas suggest that the movement ...”