Lin Zhao was a figure of Chinese dissidence under Mao. This daughter of a bourgeois, the eldest child of an affluent family in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, engaged in the Communist Revolution and executed without a trial during the Cultural Revolution, today enjoys the status of an icon for many intellectuals in her country. The short life of Lin Zhao, born...
Read MoreYou are an Eternal Book
In those early days, the poet’s mother was an idolized figure, the object of the poet’s total love. ‘At least you are an eternal book’, Baudelaire wrote at the dawn of his 18th birthday to the woman who made the mistake of marrying the austere General Aupick, only a year after his father’s death. Collected under the title Cette maladresse maternelle qui me...
Read MoreTo be a visionary
Herman Melville once wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne in these words: In a week or so, I go to New York, to bury myself in a third-story room, and work and slave on my “Whale” while it is driving through the press. That is the only way I can finish it now, — I am so pulled hither and thither by circumstances. The calm, the coolness, the...
Read MoreIs etymology relevant?
It did not take us long to transform civilization. In fifty years, we have almost stopped making war, standardised the possibility of making love without increasing the population, quarantined half of humanity, taken from our children the games once played by hands and offered them video games instead, and replaced books with social networks! The digital...
Read MoreMontaigne’s back room
In these days of solitary confinement, this correspondent remembers a one-time lawyer and courtier in 16th century France who inscribed a few lines in Latin on a pillar of his study that read like this: “…. on the last day of February, his birthday, Michael de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still...
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- Benoite Groult-pencil sketch
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- Manohar Malgonkar
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- Ajit Dutta
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- Satinath Bhaduri
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