Mr Derrida's style of deconstruction flowered especially in American departments of comparative literature, where it became interwoven with Marxism, feminism and anti-colonialism.

ECONOMIST: Obituary

Although by the early 1980s French academics had largely tired of trying to make sense of him, America's teachers of literature increasingly embraced Mr Derrida.

ECONOMIST: Obituary

Maybe Jacques Derrida is laughing at us from his grave.

FORBES: The Death of the Fact

Mr Derrida's father was a salesman of Sephardic Jewish extraction.

ECONOMIST: Obituary

He'd tossed Jessica's survey of art history, his Norton Shakespeare, and somebody's copy of Derrida's The Gift of Death into the fire pit they had dug in their backyard.

NPR: Excerpt: 'Estrellas y Rascacielos'

Mr Derrida always denied any responsibility for the undisciplined nihilism of his imitators, who gave the strong impression that deconstructionism had somehow succeeded in undermining, or even in refuting, the notion of objective truth.

ECONOMIST: Obituary

The geographical literature uses terms likes post-Fordism even Derrida gets a look in and Mr Krugman finds that very off-putting. (So does this column, it must be said.) Mr Krugman's general defence of maths in economics, and his strictures on using it properly, seem right: economic statements are based on models, he has argued, whether you acknowledge their existence or not.

ECONOMIST: Knowing your place