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“... died of tuberculosis in 1884, and the publication of whose journals caused a European sensation. Simone deBeauvoir was to cite them in The Second Sex as the archetypal example of ‘self-centred female narcissism’, but also as the discovery by the female of her independent personal existence. The young Katherine ...”

“... more conflicted about her early sexual longings. The changes of puberty are gradual, but as Simone deBeauvoir noted, menstruation functions, misleadingly, as a bright line dividing the asexual child from the sexual female: parents treat their daughters differently once they get their periods, allowing them to ...”

“... scolds her for talking to men or not doing exactly as she is told, Mariah gives her books by Simone deBeauvoir and encourages her to use birth control. She speaks openly about her marital troubles. Lucy’s disdain for her mother grows, but her new environment only reinforces their bond:My past was my mother; I ...”

“... with brains,’ the New York Times said.) Clancy’s initial destination was Paris ‘to fuck Simone deBeauvoir’, he boasted to his Chicago homey and client, Nelson Algren, who, unbeknown to him, had beaten him to it. But with a cancelled US passport and no visa, his Gallic welcome wasn’t warm. He decided to ...”

“... him the chance to prepare two brief philosophical works – L’Imagination and La Transcendance de l’égo – in which he maintained that consciousness resides not in some sequestered ‘interiority’ but in dynamic relationships located ‘outside, in the world’. These essays didn’t aspire to literary distinction, and Sartre was happy to place them ...”

“... In​ 1957, Albert Memmi published a slender but explosive book, Portrait du colonisé précédé de Portrait du colonisateur, later translated as The Coloniser and the Colonised. Memmi was a Jew from Tunisia; he was in his late thirties and firmly on the left. At the time of publication, France had entered the fourth year of an undeclared war against nationalist insurgents in Algeria; it had lost its imperial foothold in Indochina in 1954 and was now determined to hang on to its possessions in Africa ...”

“... Kauppi’s book. Like the cycles of the great Mafiosi or the history of the Comintern, the chanson de geste of the various avant gardes has a relatively immutable pattern: the first friendships and then the founding of something; the deliberate scandals and provocations; the manifestos; the enemy lists, the exclusions left and right; the hegemony of ...”

“... trying to bury national shame, at once its strongest suit and the prompt for fierce critique. For Simone deBeauvoir, to write the story of France as allegory in 1947 was an evasion since it allowed the reader to avoid reckoning with the stain of Vichy. The two central characters, Rieux and Jean Tarrou, whose private ...”

“... you believe what I am getting?”’ (One wonders who those top women were: Margaret Thatcher? Simone deBeauvoir? Mother Teresa?) His self-aggrandisement is so unbounded, his persona has eaten his person. He routinely refers to himself as ‘Trump’ or ‘Mr Trump’ and even his family members at the convention ...”

“... in 1903 to start his own house. But the French kept a tight hold on fashion. The Chambre syndicale de la haute couture was set up in 1868 to maintain standards; they insisted that ateliers make outfits to order and present a new collection of 35 looks every season. The British were caught between diktats from Paris and the new authority of money coming ...”

“... she came to San Francisco, usually once or twice a year, I instantly became her female aide-de-camp: a one-woman posse, ready to drop anything at a phone call (including the classes I was supposed to be teaching at Stanford) and drive her around to various Tower record stores and dim sum restaurants. Most important, I became adept at clucking ...”

“... and declaiming. It’s a mad and maddening farrago of sex and Modernism; it’s like Tamara de Lempicka’s compellingly horrible Art Deco paintings, but because it’s done in words, not brushstrokes, it leaves you with a feeling that it must somehow be amenable to sense. The Fountainhead was made into a Hollywood movie in 1949, with King Vidor ...”

“... War, the asylums of North Africa, clandestine anti-colonial work. Fanon was born in 1925 in Fort-de-France, the capital of Martinique, the fifth of eight children. His father, Félix, a customs inspector, was a descendant of free black cocoa farmers. His mother, Eléanoro, a shopkeeper, was the illegitimate daughter of a mixed-race couple, and appears to ...”

“... zeal for self-exploitation is one. Madame Colette, though never quite Madame Colette de l’Académie Française – one game she couldn’t crack – was accorded a state funeral by the French government: this was the woman who was dismissed by her second husband’s aristocratic family as a cunning little striptease artist overeager for the ...”

“... with Margot Fonteyn and socialise with Princess Margaret. He got to disappear into the night with Simone deBeauvoir, whom he met in a club. ‘He enjoyed the perks of being an artist,’ Feaver writes, ‘authorised to stare, to roam freely throughout society, to enjoy a freedom that his parents could never fully ...”