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“... provided us with an excuse to remain stuck in the revolving door of self-absorption. According to Deirdre Bair, ‘sex, the self and psychoanalysis’ are three of the concepts that have brought ‘sweeping societal change’ to our century. She doesn’t say whether we should rejoice over this, or wonder in dismay if solipsism hasn’t become the ...”

“... 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 Life, Force of Circumstance, All Said and Done and Adieux: A ...”

“... marriage, waiting to be loved and released into her true kingdom of the body and mind. Deirdre Bair’s massive and enthralling biography, the product of almost a decade’s writing and research, shows the steps by which Beauvoir lived out this ‘myth of femininity’, breaking away from the prudery and narrowness of a Catholic girlhood in ...”

“... not a deconstructionist, more of a righteous wrecker. Beauvoir told her eager biographer Deirdre Bair (who came to resent her superior glumness, if you read between the lines) that when she wrote The Second Sex she was ‘the messenger who brings the bad news’, and Moi has assumed her mantle. So although she laments the reluctance of feminist ...”

“... carrying his toddler on his shoulders in the funeral throng told Beauvoir’s first biographer, Deirdre Bair, that he wanted to be able to tell his daughter when she was older that they’d paid homage to a great woman. (Engraved over the columns of the Panthéon, a short walk from La Coupole, is the line ‘Aux Grands Hommes, la Patrie ...”

“... endorsed the undertaking as the ‘sole authorised biography’ (with the previous biography, by Deirdre Bair, he had been studiedly non-committal) and that he aided Knowlson in major ways, giving interviews and access to unpublished material such as diaries and letters. In that sense Knowlson’s biography can legitimately claim to be the Life, an ...”

“... all was well “with only a minimum of constraint with Smeraldina’s Ma”’. In her biography, Deirdre Bair wrote: ‘Yet he seems to have had little remorse for deeds such as this, complaining only of the loss of visiting privileges, as if someone else, a complete stranger, had committed the transgression.’ A problem arises in this edition with the ...”

“... century (in Banville’s Birchwood it becomes a genuine circus), makes two crucial appearances in Deirdre Bair’s biography of Beckett. ‘Just as he sought Jack B. Yeats’s company, Beckett avoided introductions to his brother whom he regarded as pompous and posturing, fatuously slobbering over all the wrong aspects of Ireland and Irish ...”