“... have breakfast and lunch and sometimes dinner with important French writers, with the exception of Sartre who despised him for being a civil servant with two masters. His output became meagre and his books grew poorer in style but richer in political content to please Havana and thus stay in Paris. He never got the Nobel Prize, by the way. Death got him ...”

“... of hers, about whom she once wrote a monograph, but who does not loom so large here: Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. This resemblance made me curiously receptive to the quite improbable claim of her publishers that Murdoch can be read as an introduction to philosophy. What judicious teacher would place this farrago in the hands ...”