Peter Salmon

What is particularly exhilarating – and ultimately frustrating – about “53 Days” is the sense that Perec himself hasn’t worked out where the book is going.

‘Mayakovsky was not, of course, the first poet or the last to desire a revolution of the spirit, a re-evaluation of all values. For all that he believed that he believed in Communism, it is not hard to imagine Mayakovsky in the clothes of one of the Romantics, or of the Fascists, or of the Beats, replacing the word Soviet with Love or Fatherland or Peace. The difficulty for Mayakovsky, however, was that his desired revolution had happened, the State for which he had cheered actually emerged.’

‘In the winter of 1940, during the first months of the Nazi occupation of France, the analogies between the world of the Iliad and the situation in Europe were, for Simone Weil, striking and chilling. There were broken truces, a city under siege, and failed attempts to appease one man’s wrath. That Troy was destined to be sacked seemed inevitable. For Weil, waiting for an exit visa with a battered copy of the Iliad in her rucksack in case she was arrested, Homer’s great epic seemed to be completely of the moment.’ Peter Salmon on Simone Weil and a new translation of the Iliad.

The death of Stephen Ward stands as an iconic moment in British history, when the establishment, confronted by a new liberalism, had its hypocrisy exposed by a heady cocktail of female sexuality (a threat then, a threat now), race and politics.