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“... Six’ addressed the people of Paris. He spoke – or shouted – from his cell in the Tour de la Liberté, and in no uncertain terms. The officials holding him, and the regime they served, were villains, devils, criminals and worse. What’s more, they had already begun to slit the prisoners’ throats. There was no time to lose. That evening, the ...”

“... For example (on page 118, to be precise), Marie-Laure (1), Maurice Bischoffsheim (2), the Comtesse de Chevigné (3), the Duchesse de Guermantes (4), the Marquis deSade (5), Jean Cocteau (6), the Vicomte ...”

“... Thomas Jefferson, then American Ambassador to France, paid a visit to the dungeon of the Château de Vincennes. Its three-metre-thick walls had previously imprisoned Diderot and the Marquis deSade. Now, however, it housed the workshop of a gunsmith, Honoré Blanc, and a dozen ...”

“... Before his passage to Africa, young Gorer had already published The Revolutionary Ideas of the Marquis deSade and his mood was still dandy-left, rive-gauche, smoothly dissident and shocking. Africa Dances is now reissued as a paperback, in regrettably abbreviated form, with no pictures. We may trace in it the ...”

“... otherwise appear to be slumbrously distant. The fable is in the tradition of Boccaccio and the Marquis deSade. It drifts in the direction of a series of set-pieces: women recounting stories of their amorous pasts. Otherwise, it is la vie de château with all the usual ...”

“... this upheaval, undermining the system that upheld their privilege. As Louis-Philippe, Comte de Ségur, observed: ‘Without regret for the past, without anxiety for the future, we walked gaily across a carpet of flowers which concealed the abyss beneath.’ After Louis XVI’s execution in January 1793, Robespierre enjoined citizens of the new order to ...”

“... do except imagine, fantasise and, what often follows, masturbate. Although the chief interest in Sade’s Letters from Prison lies in tracing the stimulus incarceration gave to his literary imagination, one should honour in passing his phenomenal achievements in solitary vice. At the age of 44 he was claiming to masturbate eight times daily. ‘One good hour ...”

“... From the Church Fathers, through St Ignatius Loyola and Pascal to the Marquis deSade, the problem of pain was agonisingly debated, not least because mortification was holiness and judicial torture the authorised engine of truth. But nowadays, pain, in either its medical or its metaphysical aspects, is oddly little discussed given the ubiquitous misery it causes ...”

“... muscat grapes); rich lunches of olives, rabbit pâté and figs; leisurely dinners of saucisses de Toulouse, fried aubergines, peaches and red wine. She luxuriates in the rituals and décor of the boudoir – a nightgown of ‘eau-de-nil silk with pencil shoulder straps’, coral toe-nail polish, laceedged linen ...”

“... The Sadeian Woman (1979), a prophetic blast about porn and a highly polemical shout for the Marquis deSade, was dreamed up by the two of them (they were soul sisters, co-conspirators) while talking together one evening. Virago at the time was also the catalyst of a broader campaign: to break the gentlemen’s ...”

“... Catholic Bible, the ‘Willibrord’ translation, and at one point briefly changed his pen name to Marquis Gerard Kornelis Franciscus van het Reve – a nod at once to his favourite marquis, de Sade, and (he was christened Franciscus) to the sacrament of baptism.His life was full of ...”

“... to life’. His death was figurative – he had been held in the Bastille for 18 years by lettre de cachet. The king’s sealed letter, authorising the detention of a man or woman without trial for an indeterminate period of time, was one of the Ancien Régime’s most reviled mechanisms. The letters began to be used by the king for the maintenance of public ...”

“... he, we wonder, when he says, ‘When it comes to kinkiness in prose I am a better writer than the Marquis deSade’? The urge to charm through provocation, the conviction that he’ll be liked, leads him to praise the phone manner of Stalin and ‘to rather warm to Adolf’ Hitler; this over-confidence results ten ...”

“... suffers at the hands of those above it and makes suffer those below it. Pauline Réage and the Marquis deSade would recognise the architecture of these pieces, but where Réage and Sade offered precisely detailed illustrations of the experiences of O and Justine, Larkin sketches ...”

“... was your life with Picasso?’ as follows: Tout à fait exaltante. Couverte d’amour, de baisers, de jalousie et d’admiration. She then went on to describe her lover’s tearful joy at the news of her pregnancy. A more interesting account of this relationship will be found in Roy MacGregor-Hastie’s gossipy ...”