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“... Has anyone ever written a satirical account of the first meeting between Simone deBeauvoir and Sartre? In an age when victims long to be mocked, in a country where satire is an essential part of the cultural heritage, and with two principals who have together inspired much controversy and aroused much dislike, the apparent absence of ridicule must be significant ...”

“... many who will find it significant that Anne Whitmarsh, beginning a careful and detailed study of Simone deBeauvoir with a section called ‘Biographical Notes’, should make the first entry read, ‘1905 21 June: Jean-Paul Sartre born in Paris’, and the last: ‘1980: Death of Sartre’. There are those for whom ...”

“... sense typical) is not usually shared by the more cynical and abrupt French – ‘un emmerdeur de moins,’ replied a Paris lycée teacher when her pupils asked her what she thought about the death of Bernard Shaw. But it was the French who, on this occasion, showed the greater sentimentality. The news of Sartre’s death was greeted with general ...”

“... In an uncharacteristic moment of playfulness during her affair with Nelson Algren, Simone deBeauvoir called herself his ‘frog wife’. Although it echoed his tough-guy slang about their Paris-Chicago romance, the phrase has the ring of feminist fable. Like Hans Christian Andersen’s little mermaid, whose story Beauvoir wept over as a child, the frog wife is a changeling, unlike other women; pebbly and awkward, she cannot wed the prince ...”

“... Early in 1947 Simone deBeauvoir made her first trip to the United Sates. The Cold War was beginning and, like Sartre, Camus and the rest of their circle, she was searching for a third-camp alternative to Stalinism and American imperialism. Beauvoir was drawn to the United States for other reasons, anticipating, as she put it at the beginning of America Day by Day, the chronicle of the journey that she published the year after she returned to France, ‘a world so full, so rich, and so unexpected that I’ll have the extraordinary adventure of becoming a different me ...”

“... from the Sartre biographies (Annie Cohen-Solal, John Gerassi, Ronald Hayman) over those from the Beauvoir biographies (Deirdre Bair – very much the best; Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier, Margaret Crosland). Check those against the crucial four volumes of Beauvoir’s memoirs, those translated as The Prime of ...”

“... his poems ahead of him not yet talking to the sun at Key West, his liver not yet enlarged. Simone deBeauvoir travelling America, falling in love with Nelson Algren, describing the US in pronouncements mostly pissed and mostly ...”

“... In June 1946 Simone deBeauvoir was 38. She had just finished The Ethics of Ambiguity, and was wondering what to write next. Urged by Jean Genet, she went to see the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, on show for the first time after the war. Citizen Kane was also being shown in Paris for the first time, and Beauvoir was impressed: Orson Welles had revolutionised cinema ...”

“... Simone deBeauvoir had to change her original title for When things of the spirit come first, because it had been unexpectedly pre-empted by the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. The new title which she picked (Quand prime le spirituel) was a simple variant of the other (Primauté du Spirituel), and the difference has in any case become insignificant in the English translation ...”

“... and Albert Camus in relation to the Algerian war. The following three chapters are devoted to Simone deBeauvoir, Marcuse and Foucault. The last author (and the only live one) is the exiled Afrikaner Breyten Breytenbach. What do these writers have in common? One is that they are all on the left. They supported the ...”

“... The category of the Other,’ Simone deBeauvoir declared in the opening pages of The Second Sex, ‘is as primordial as consciousness itself.’ No doubt she was right. But it is hard to believe that the term has ever had such intellectual currency as it has at present ...”

“... as yet unrepentant individualist lacks both the servitude and the grandeur it once held for Alfred de Vigny, it does offer him the rare opportunities of exile, from his familiars in Paris, from teaching philosophy, from going after women. The sudden impoverishment of his external life prompts him to look within, to enjoy a happy, voluble season of ...”

“... Spark’s favourite catch-phrases, along with such classics of the catch-phrase form as ‘crème de la crème’, ‘pisseur de copie’, ‘neither good-looking nor bad-looking’, ‘we must always think about les autres.’ The Comforters, in fact, itself concluded with a character going on his way rejoicing; Loitering ...”

“... laboured. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the women and the gay men make the most interesting studies. Simone deBeauvoir, whose silk dresses, turbans and perfect manicures bore witness to her willingness to undertake what she called ‘the work’ of fashion, says in The Second Sex: ‘dressing up is … a uniform and an ...”

“... On campus everyone wore jeans but in the city everyone wore mink, Simone deBeauvoir observed when she visited Vassar College to give a talk in February 1947. The reason, she thought, was that American women dress to tell the world about their standard of living, or to make men stare: ‘The truth is that the way European women dress is much less servile ...”