Roger Peyrefitte - Press Cuttings

Press Cuttings

I love the lambs, not the sheep. (J'aime les agneaux, pas les moutons!)

• Obituary in The Times, 7 November 2000, page 25. "In the minds of many, Roger Peyrefitte's reputation as a genuinely literary novelist is based on one novel. Les Amitiés Particulières (1944), which was also his first. He wrote many others, but none really matched the merit of the first, and the author seemed increasingly to seek a succès de scandale rather than any serious critical consideration."

• Obituary by James Kirkup in The Independent: The Tuesday Review, 7 November 2000, page 6. "Peyrefitte was a skilled manipulator of the media. He was charismatic to the point of absurdity, with his dramatic gestures and outrageous behaviour, so that in the end no one took any notice of his often ludicrous fabrications, though they were always delivered with great style and conviction, and with an effrontery that was amusingly malicious. {...} Peyrefitte acknowledges the courage of his great predecessors André Gide, Marcel Proust, Jean Cocteau and Oscar Wilde, while regretting the timidity of Marcel Jouhandeau and many of the contemporary French writers, whether gay or straight, in pursuing the cause of homosexual (and heterosexual) rights."

• Obituary by Douglas Johnson in The Guardian, 15 November 2000, page 24. "André Gide, who had attempted to defend homosexuality in a much earlier work, was prophetic in his congratulations to Peyrefitte. He did not think that Les Amitiés Particulières would win the Goncourt prize, but he did believe it would still be read a century later."