TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘Albert Camus – The Notebooks’…

Camus contre Camus

The trials of a public intellectual By Patrick McGuinness

“Sadness of success”, writes Albert Camus in a notebook entry for June 25, 1947: “If everything were more difficult for me, as before, I’d have much more right to say what I say”. The success in question was winning the Prix des Critiques for La Peste (The Plague), published a fortnight earlier. It could be worse, the reader wants to tell him by way of consolation: you could have won the Nobel. Fast-forward ten years and the entry for October 17, 1957, reads: “Nobel. Strange feeling of overwhelming weight and melancholy. At 20 years old, poor and naked, I knew true glory. My mother”.

Infernal time machine

China Miéville’s anti-colonialist vision By Anna Aslanyan

Open season on Barbara

A romantic novelist who became a figure of fun By Nicola Shulman

One of the happy few?

How writing freed Anita Brookner from despair By Elizabeth Lowry