The Higher Thought

Susan Sontag has died at the age of 71. I was always slightly baffled by her. Lots of people whom I took seriously took her seriously, yet whenever I tackled something she had written I usually found it at best unsatisfactory and occasionally incomprehensible. I did, however, like her book On Photography, which I’ve just pulled out and have been re-reading. She’s had lots of appreciative obituaries, plus a predictably dyspeptic one by Roger Kimball, a doyen of the strand of American conservatism which is currently, er, triumphing in Iraq. Sontag would be delighted, I guess, by his piece. You can tell tell the quality of a woman by the enemies she makes.