“... 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 ...”

“... superseded by the prophetic Adorno of 1941. In dedicating the ‘Prolegomènes’ of his study to Simone deBeauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Leibowitz had involuntarily drawn attention to the absence from his own admirably conscientious work of that foresight which ensured that Adorno’s relatively slender contribution ...”

“... by Roudinesco, the author of Lacan & Co, Why Psychoanalysis? and, most recently, La Part obscure de nous-mêmes (not yet translated). If not, you might enjoy parts of the book anyway. Roudinesco has a novelist’s talent for distilling the scattered nonsense of a certain sociohistorical milieu into pithy soundbites. How economically she skewers That’s Not ...”

“... an amnesiac tabula rasa state of mind. (Women, he said, are in this sense the ‘other people’: Simone deBeauvoir called them that, so there is a second Sartre-related resonance to the phrase.) To Company he said similar things, minus the change of sex: ‘The appeal of the plot was to introduce a tabula rasa – a ...”

“... ink has been spilled in quarrelling over feminism … perhaps we should say no more about it’: Simone deBeauvoir, at the very beginning of The Second Sex (1949). ‘The subject is irritating, especially to women.’ Long before they were shouting ‘Ban the Bunny’ and dressing up as butchers, feminists were ...”

“... and did monoprints on weekends with her friend Frances, a wisecracking old dame in Capri pants and Simone deBeauvoir turban. Together they inked rollers, tore newsprint for collages and cut do-it-yourself mats while my mother declaimed on the subject of Turk’s husbandly misdeeds.* Frances, puffing on mentholated ...”

“... his barely cold cadaver. At five o’clock in the afternoon of Monday, 9 October 1967, a las cinco de la tarde, Guevara’s body, on a stretcher strapped to the landing rails of a helicopter, arrived in the Bolivian hill town of Vallegrande. He had been shot some four hours earlier, on the orders – we were to discover much later – of the High Command of ...”

“... always rich in oil but poor in ink. But there were other cultural achievements beyond printing de-luxe editions of Cuban classics in the very young Caribbean republic. One must not forget that Cuba was the last colony in America to become independent from Spain. This happened only in 1902, and after that the small island was submitted to some sort of ...”

“... his conjugal duties; followed by a bed-switch involving more dupery (taken from Philippe de Laon’s One Hundred New Tales); followed by a moralité about a vengeful wife who murders and dismembers her husband (by François de Rosset). A more refined example of romance (a cloudy category), from a later ...”

“... British second-wave feminism, embedding her book in her political activism and youthful reading of Simone deBeauvoir’s self-loathing (or at best ambivalent) book about being old, La Vieillesse. Back then, in the early 1970s, we baby boomers threatened our elders with radical change without thinking that we would ever ...”