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“... of my research’ (it was later withdrawn), and he gave ‘the most sensitive files’, as Benoît Peeters puts it, the methodical combing ‘that everyone had been waiting for’. Peeters, a Tintinologist of long standing who once wrote a study of The Castafiore Emerald under Barthes’s supervision, regrets ...”

“... as if it were a cruel punishment. Yet he wrote constantly about himself, in what his biographer Benoît Peeters calls ‘memoirs that are not memoirs’. The first half of The Post Card (1980) is an epistolary novel composed of envois to an unnamed lover. His 1991 essay ‘Circumfession’, written in stream-of-consciousness as his mother lay ...”

“... in English (1957-75) looks more like a monument than a point of reference.A recent biographer, Benoît Peeters, is keen to make a case for Valéry’s prose but says ‘the poetry … is no doubt what has aged him the most.’ I do think the early poems seem locked into the French equivalent of a Pre-Raphaelite moment, but even then there are ...”