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[...] her passion for contemporary art is real. As far as I'm concerned, I'm not actively hostile to it: I am not an advocate of craft, nor of a return to figurative painting; I maintain the disinterested attitude appropriate to an accounts manager. Questions of aesthetics and politics are not my t…

I spent the last day of my compassionate leave in various travel agencies. I liked holiday brochures, their abstraction, their way of condensing the places of the world into a limited sequence of possible pleasures and fares; I was particularly fond of the star-ratings system, which indicated the i…

[...] Father, father, I said to myself, how great was your vanity! To the left of my field of vision I could make out a weightlifting bench, barbells. I quickly visualised a moron in shorts —his face wrinkled, but otherwise very like mine— building up his pectorals with hopeless vigour. Father, I s…

I spent fifteen minutes strolling under the arcades with their metal beams, slightly surprised by my own nostalgia and aware, at the same time, that the place really was extremely ugly. Those hideous buildings had been constructed during the worst period of modernism, but nostalgia has nothing to d…

‘Only on the surface, it seems to me. The only true atheists I’ve ever met were people in revolt. It wasn’t enough for them to coldly deny the existence of God – they had to refuse it, like Bakunin: “Even if God existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him.” They were atheists like Kirilov in The …