Louis-Jean Calvet is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Provence, Aix-en-Provence.

"Succinct, accesible and witty ... Calvet deftly sketches a unified portrait of the man and his work." Publishers Weekly "Calvet admirably traverses the texts surrounding the life of the writer with sympathy and detached scholarship." Times Higher Education Supplement "Well researched. Besides Barthes's depression after his mother's death ... and his cryptic allusions to his desire to write a literary work, several other "biographemes" evoked by Calvet are touching and telling; his love for Schumann's piano music, his "doodling", his cigars, his overeating, his frequent "boredom", the fragile yet firm "grain" of his voice. Calvet also approaches, with sensitivity, the importance of homosexuality to Barthes's life and work." Times Literary Supplement "Calvet's biography is a wide stop-gap which ... succeeds in demonstrating that Roland Barthes was an utterly captivating individual." The Independent on Sunday"Barthes has been fortunate in another way, for Calvet is an unfashionably courteous biographer." The Guardian"Enjoyable ... it provides a good overview of an unexpectedly uncertain career." Radical Philosophy"From Writing Degree Zero to the haunting late essays, Roland Barthes's astonishing critical intelligence lived its own life, and the story that a mrere Barthes biographer can hope to tell is likely to be banal and bathetic in comparison. Calvet in his compelling new book avoids this danger by giving the public face of Barthes's ideas a central role in his narrative." Malcolm Bowie, University of Oxford

• Preliminary Note. Preface: The Genealogical Silence.1. A Ward of the Nation.2. A Little Gentleman.3. In Limbo.4. Paris - Bucharest.5. From Alexandria to Writing Degree Zero. .6. The Theatre Years.7. The Ecole, At Last.8. Structures Do Not Take to the Streets.9. Tel Quel.10. The Collége de France.11. An Unqualifiable Life, A Life without Quality.12. The 'After Death'.Notes.Bibliography of Roland Barthes.Index.