Describe a circle, stroke its back and it turns vicious.

The critic should describe, and not prescribe.

There's signals for just about everything from balancing your stroke, to getting a swimmer more into their turns, to just yelling so they know to get going.

This breaks that vicious circle of retaliation. And you never get to the bottom of it with two kids; it becomes about who's lying.

Politics separate men by bringing them together only superficially. Art and culture unite us in a common anguish that is our only possible fraternity, that of our existential and metaphysical community.

I was born near Bucharest, but my parents came to France a year later. We moved back to Romania when I was thirteen, and my world was shattered. I hated Bucharest, its society, and its mores - its anti-Semitism for example.