The American writer's early diaries map a burning passion for life, ideas and the desired other

As a writer Susan Sontag located herself behind her subject. After her death it is her personality that is memorialised. Angela McRobbie deciphers this use of a great intellectual's legacy.

‘New’ Labour’s life-force is to move beyond – and forget – its leftist predecessors, who brought to democracy a passion for argument, vibrant radical politics, multicultural focus, and theoretical Marxism. But precisely these elements helped bring Tony Blair to power – and a denial of this past is sinking his project.

The move of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) from academic analysis towards vigorous public engagement was a refreshing reversal of a familiar trend. It was also characteristic of an intellectual whose interest in power, value, “symbolic violence” and the quality of media and political culture is increasingly relevant to the way we live. A London-based colleague, working in an environment less receptive to Bourdieu’s radicalism, pays warm tribute.

The flexible, multi-task lives of creative people in the modern city are celebrated by media and political cheerleaders as evidence of the liberating potential of the new cultural economy. But they are also part of a remorseless polarisation which glamourises its young meteors, and disciplines the rest. Can a generation of post-individualists find freedom in equity?