“... wife, in a photograph Begley reproduces twice in his book because he finds it so moving, and which Roland Barthes described as ‘one of the loveliest photographs in the world’. Nadar also took a photograph of her 35 years earlier, shortly after they were married, in which she sits back, arms folded protectively, eyes fixed on the camera, sceptical and ...”

“... without too much resemblance to actual things in the world (in this respect he is current with Roland Barthes or, more pertinently, with Ernst Gombrich, whose Art and Illusion he read at the time). On the other hand, when a Mondrian begins to look like a golf ball, then the category of abstraction might be in trouble too. Modernist painting often ...”

“... Garbo studies has acquired all the trappings of a negative theology. Garbo’s face is an idea, Roland Barthes declared in 1957, not an event: it projects an essential rather than an existential beauty. The ‘divine’ Garbo descended, Barthes wrote, ‘from a heaven where all things are formed and perfected in the ...”

“... innovation in the English criticism of Verne, he is much indebted to such Parisian predecessors as Roland Barthes, Michel Butor and Michel Serres. Moreover, The Mask of the Prophet is a sequel to Martin’s earlier book, The Knowledge of Ignorance: From Genesis to Jules Verne (1985), so there is a certain amount of self-repetition. Martin sets out both to ...”

“... of precipitous foreshortening is manifest above all in the extinctions which spatter his reign. As Roland Barthes pointed out, deaths don’t just accumulate in Tacitus’ narrative of Nero’s reign, they seem to multiply and proliferate, as if racing to some kind of baroque finale. The typical murder attempted by this thespian prince is the staged ...”

“... but also tells the life – is interested in what a life might be; it quotes Mel Brooks and Roland Barthes (in that order). McCann’s interest in the layering of identity is not new for him. In his book on Marilyn Monroe (1988) he writes: ‘Monroe was a professional role-player, she assumed a multiplicity of selves, of “Marilyns”, making it ...”

“... excites our desire to know more. His handling of this desire, what’s more, might have pleased Roland Barthes, for the novel’s construction candidly runs the reader’s curious pleasure in a story up against the extended pleasure of controlled foreplay. Ptoly recounts the story of Xanthippe to his 16-year-old niece-mistress Jo-Jo over gourmet meals ...”

“... writing was ‘a tissue of quotations’, and that the writer’s ‘only power is to mix’, as Roland Barthes taught, when DJ Shadow was riding high. Techno’s imagery fitted well with the traces and fields that post-structuralism traded in, and the rave scene’s communal, anti-starry ethos could with a bit of imaginative effort be seen as another ...”

“... Marxist, and so was distant from such diverse critics of everyday culture as Raymond Williams and Roland Barthes. Banham once described his prose as ‘flip, throw-away, smarty-pants, look-at-me’, which might seem to ally it with the New Journalism of a Tom Wolfe. But Wolfe is a reactionary, and his nasty swipe at modern architecture, From Bauhaus to ...”

“... this strange and eloquent book, as Augustine himself hoped. But it can’t be, by definition, what Roland Barthes called a readerly text, a conventionally familiar one, even in Constantine’s compelling and fluent new translation: it is a book that wants to be more accessible and hospitable than it could possibly be because the writing of the book is ...”

“... to tread, and specialised in finding the profound in the superficial. Thirty years later, Barthes compared Citroëns to cathedrals and identified the mythical appeal of washing powder. But Kracauer dived into the shallows first.Benjamin praised him as a fellow ragpicker, sorting through cultural trash for meaning. In writing about our bewitchment by ...”

“... didn’t exist has only increased his fascination in the Post-Modern era. It’s some time since Roland Barthes announced the death of the author, insisting that all texts should be seen merely as a ‘multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash’. No texts could illustrate this idea of literature more ...”

“... was a discrete journey, with its own characteristics, its challenges and its perils, so that, as Roland Barthes pointed out, the Tour had a Homeric quality. It was exceptionally exciting in a predominantly rural society to watch the Tour de France go by, and roads were lined with spectators who did not normally have the opportunity of seeing great ...”

“... occasions when language draws attention to itself, when it becomes ‘intransitive’, as Roland Barthes preferred to put it, and is relieved of its referential and instrumental duties. Bakhtin is as attentive to the language of literature as any Formalist could wish, but he comes to radically different conclusions about its nature. The ...”

“... problems that intrude on the conscience of the holiday maker. It’s forty years or more since Roland Barthes unpicked the Guide Bleu. The sting in the tale of that consummate essay was reserved for the guff about the ‘prosperity’ of Spain twenty years after the defeat of the Republic: ‘the Guide does not tell us, of course, how this fine ...”