“... be ranked? As a profession? As domestic science? As art and mystery? A ‘torture of Sisyphus’ (Simone deBeauvoir)? A sanitarian crusade? A divinely ordained form of drudgery? An unpaid, male-imposed scam? A therapy that expands the chest while allowing the stressed mind to freewheel? Or was it, and is it, just the ...”

“... is something fascinating about opening a book by a writer one knows nothing about. A good reader, Simone deBeauvoir once wrote, has to be willing to follow the writer on her adventure. I took her advice, cleared my mind and tried to follow Cristina Campo on her journey. I was in for a shock: in these essays, Campo ...”

“... We don’t admire​ Simone Weil because we agree with her, Susan Sontag argued in 1963: ‘I cannot believe that more than a handful of the tens of thousands of readers she has won since the posthumous publication of her books and essays really share her ideas.’ What we admire, Sontag thought, is her extreme seriousness, her absolute effort to become ‘excruciatingly identical with her ideas’, to make herself a person who is ‘rightly regarded as one of the most uncompromising and troubling witnesses to the modern travail of the spirit ...”

“... relations with women, beginning with his mother, continuing through the decades with his companion Simone deBeauvoir, punctuated, at times with her as stage manager, by affairs with countless younger women, and ending with his adoption of one of them – Arlette Elkaim – as his daughter and literary heir. Sartre as ...”

“... writers have in common – Marianne Moore, Katherine Anne Porter, Rebecca West, P.L. Travers, Simone deBeauvoir, Elizabeth Bishop, Nadine Gordimer and Anne Sexton, who appear in the volume alongside the writers already mentioned – is that they are not men, which is not as tautological a proposition as it ...”

“... which he took part, or the incandescent power of its images. ‘The last pictures of Lumumba,’ Simone deBeauvoir wrote in her autobiography, ‘the photographs of his wife leading the mourners, head shaved, breast bared – what novel could compete with that?’ It’s a very good question. Significant attempts to ...”

“... They may contain ‘projects’ with posthumous implications, a provision recommended by Simone deBeauvoir, or they may be spent in idleness or even wickedness, having few virtuous connections with the rest of the life in question, or with the structures of literary narrative. Nor do readings of the past and ...”

“... of the Lisburn Road, where Ulster banners fly from the lampposts, to the City Hall with its eau-de-nil dome and pale stone statue of Queen Victoria. The clinic isn’t easy to find: the signs beside the door at No 14 are for BioKinetic Europe, which runs clinical trials, MKB Law, and Bupa; next door there’s a Tesco Express and Boojum, a ‘Mexican Burrito ...”

“... of battling with the Estate seems to have altered Rose’s work, much as the discovery of Paul de Man’s wartime journalism forced Deconstructionists to deal with history. As she writes, ‘it can be argued (it has recently been argued in relation to the critic Paul de Man) that faced with the reality of the ...”

“... were killed and 14 wounded: that started the revolution. In 1962, after a long and atrocious war, de Gaulle and the bewildered, exhausted French were forced to grant Algeria its independence. Millions of young Frenchmen were sent out to ‘defend’ French Algeria. A few thousand behaved disgracefully: torture was often used to extract information from ...”

“... The Second Sex, had also combined formal academic training with a tumultuous private life. But Simone deBeauvoir siphoned her more extreme autobiographical references into her novels. Greer, by contrast, drew spicily and in depth on her own biology and experiences. She was also beautiful and six feet tall. So she ...”

“... this may have been due to his own ‘temporary state of mind’. English Heppenstall also finds Simone deBeauvoir ‘an utter bore’ (‘No feminist can ever have so abjectly betrayed what men consider the feminine condition by tagging along behind Sartre’), and he says he once christened her – ‘wittily I ...”

“... in effect, as Nasser’s man in Paris, reportedly delivering messages from the Egyptians to de Gaulle during the Evian negotiations between France and the Algerian National Liberation Front. Nasser couldn’t have had a better emissary on the Left Bank: al-Samman, one of whose mentors was a former Resistance fighter who had survived Mauthausen, was ...”

“... are harbingers of a slide to nothingness, not marks of a transcendence to come. To grow old, as Simone deBeauvoir said, ‘is to define oneself’ and being defined, even self-defined, is privative as well as positive. The ascent to seniority prunes possibility: the old are what they are and, to a lesser ...”

“... the editor of Le Monde, ‘that Camus would say some fucking fool thing.’ Sartre and Beauvoir’s response was very similar – they had long ceased to be on speaking terms with Camus because of his ‘reactionary’ tendencies. The irony, as Olivier Todd points out, was that Camus had joined the Communist Party in 1935 because he felt it was a ...”