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“... As I begin to write this, innumerable other reviews are being born. Some are being word-processed in paper-free offices, others handwritten in the Club lounges of intercontinental jets and others still dictated over breakfast on luminous southern terraces. But the reviewer I feel closest to is the lonely midnight scribbler – aching for his bed, dreaming of his cheque and as familiar with his emerging sentences as a ploughman is with his latest furrow ...”

“... Jean-Pierre Richard, Robert Greer Cohn, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Leo Bersani, Malcolm Bowie and others. It might seem surprising, therefore, not to find a single full-length biography published between Henri Mondor’s 1941 Vie de Mallarmé and Gordon Millan’s Mallarmé: A Throw of the Dice. Millan notes in his Introduction that ...”

“... For Freud these repetitions are the consequences of a failure to remember. Psychoanalysis, as Malcolm Bowie writes, ‘is overwhelmingly concerned with the production and transformation of meaning’. Whatever cannot be transformed, psychically processed, reiterates itself. A trauma is whatever there is in a person’s experience that resists useful ...”

“... It is a pleasure, and we shouldn’t pass it up; or if we do, we should know what we are missing. Malcolm Bowie’s remarkable book is about reading in several senses: it rests on a habit of reading Proust, has the easy familiarity with a voluminous text that only many readings could give; it offers brilliant close readings of many passages of ...”

“... stay for such pedantries anyway? Who holds off from the lyrical afflatus, when it happens? Not Malcolm Bowie of Queen Mary College, London (‘all in a splendid surge of creativity’); not Claude Rawson of the University of Warwick (‘no doubt of the power ... at the acute cutting edge of feeling’); not Elaine Feinstein, from Cambridge (‘the ...”

“... incomprehensible book, Ecrits. To read Dan Sperber on Lévi-Strauss, Hayden White on Foucault, or Malcolm Bowie on Lacan, is to realise that the terrain, until recently so inhospitable, has been expertly mapped, the rough places made plain, and pleasant bowers and seats arranged for the ascending traveller at just the conceptual altitude where he will ...”

“... it is by his standards plainly written. Even so, there is everything to be said for first going to Malcolm Bowie’s ‘Modern Master’ on Lacan, for which we have had to wait almost as long as for the volumes of the Séminaìres. The wait has paid off, for this is an astonishing feat of exposition, clear, judicious and economical in argument, and ...”

“... and parasitically on the outer surface of an implacable unconscious had its grandeur,’ Malcolm Bowie writes in his introduction to An Outline of Psychoanalysis. ‘But the disproportion between the conscious and unconscious components of the mind gives a strange air of self-apology to Freud’s defence of science and reason, for science, even ...”

“... of Margaret Thatcher, Vivienne Westwood ‘lost interest’ in punk. She and her lover Malcolm McLaren had been at the heart of the British version: they had dreamed up much of the look, the attitude and the lyrics, though not the sound. A full year before David Bowie adopted the same hair style, Westwood had her ...”

“... In his remarkable Proust among the Stars, the one study of A la recherche equal to its splendours, Malcolm Bowie observed with justice that while Time in this mode is ‘a “big” controlling theme’, calling forth ‘an impressive philosophical diction’, it ‘levitates too obligingly above the restless detail of Proust’s writing’ in ways that ...”

“... and had been members of a succession of youth tribes themselves. There is a telling photo here of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood in 1971, posing in their first shop, young and hungry-looking and dressed for attention. But it would be another five years before they became famous, for stage-managing the rise of the Sex Pistols. In the British 1970s, even ...”

“... where they sit around in their underwear and eat pizza. They fix two postcards to the wall, of Malcolm X and Emiliano Zapata. When the kids go to sleep, they drink a bottle of wine and smoke a joint. Their children say cute things and barely ever whine. They are grave and earnest, listening to their parents’ oral histories of the Apaches and getting ...”

“... Back; a new documentary about Mark David Chapman; an article trailed as ‘the inside story of how Bowie met John Lennon’; a lockdown viewing of the dreary Richard Curtis film Yesterday; a mystifying Japanese tweet, apparently about Ringo.And those are just the ones I remembered to jot down. Then there was the dream I had in which a snatched photo of the ...”

“... glance around the society of the spectacle is a sufficient reminder – pays. So too, sex. Malcolm Bowie’s ‘enveloping category of categories’, ‘recklessly exceeding the requirements of the plot’, is another reason for the allure of A la recherche. Novels governed by the dynamics of desire, naturally, pre-existed Proust – Laclos and ...”