This is the London Review of Books podcast.

The LRB is currently on its summer break between issues,

a gap in the schedule that our late colleague John Sturrock

once referred to as the monstrous hiatus,

which we're filling on the podcast with readings from the paper's archive.

First up, we have Terry Castle,

reading her piece on Susan Sontag from 2005.

Desperately Seeking Susan by Terry Castle.

A few weeks ago, I found myself scanning photographs of Susan Sontag into my screensaver file.

A tiny headshot clipped from Newsweek. Two that had appeared in the New York

Times, another printed alongside Alan Gorgainis's obituary in The Advocate, a glossy American,

gay and lesbian mag, usually devoted to pulcritudinous,

Jim Bunny's gay sitcom stars, and treatments for flesh-eating strep.

It seemed the least I could do for the bedazzling, now dead, she eminence.

The most beautiful photo I downloaded was one that Peter Hujar took of her in the

1970s, around the time of I, etc. She's wearing a thin, gray turtleneck and lies on her back, arms up, head resting on her

clasped hands, and her gaze fixed impassively on something to the right of the frame. There's a

slightly pedantic quality to the whole thing, which I like,

very true to life. Every few hours now, she floats up on screen in this digitized format,

supine, sleek, and flat-chested. No doubt hundreds, thousands of people knew Susan Sontag

better than I did. For ten years, ours was an on-again, off-again, semi-friendship,

constricted by role-playing, and shot through in the end with mutual irritation.

...