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“... with well-mannered elegance. Axel Madsen has also written biographies of Yves St Laurent, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and a book about the love-affair between Joseph Kennedy and Gloria Swanson. He seems always to write about various kinds of star, presumably so as to reveal their secrets to their adoring fans in the usual sensational ...”

“... Bergson’s sparingness in the matter of language perished with him. He died in 1941, just when Jean-Paul Sartre, homo loquax made flesh, was launching unscrupulously out on the seven hundred pages of L’Etre et le néant. And, fresh from reading Bergson, I find it frustrating that his sociable brevity, and the even more sociable clarity that went ...”

“... Marxism​ is still very young, almost in its infancy,’ Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in 1957, more than seventy years after Karl Marx’s death. Sartre had first read Marx three decades earlier when he, too, was still very young. At the time, the author of Capital had seemed a figure of merely historical interest ...”

“... human beings, and not as they ought to be.’ (She’d said as much in an epigraph borrowed from Sartre: ‘À moitié victimes, à moitié complices, comme tout le monde.’) But in a later interview she answered the same question angrily:The history of my life itself is a kind of problematic, and I don’t have to give solutions to people and people ...”

“... to track than fashionable hemlines, but he seems palpably incurious about this smudgy horizon. Sartre gets a single sentence referencing his ‘famous dictum that “One must act to be free.”’ Hang about – is that his famous dictum? I’m a bit hazy after forty years, but off the top of my head (current haircut modelled after the sleeve of Chet Baker ...”

“... strange time, starting with the introduction, a five-page polemic against the spirit of our age: Jean-Paul Sartre – for or against? Raymond Aron – for or against? … Should we take a blowtorch to May 1968 and its ideas … seen now as incomprehensible, elitist, dangerous and anti-democratic? Have the protagonists of that revolution … all become ...”

“... fille dérangée, translated into English in 1996 as A Disgraceful Affair: Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre and Bianca Lamblin. While professing to be a kind of perverse tribute, the Lamblin book is actually a morbid recounting of its author’s adolescent love affair with Simone de Beauvoir, who first seduced her then passed her over – with ...”

“... of magazines and journals at the time, including Les Temps modernes. Soon Rohmer met its editor, Jean-Paul Sartre. Young intellectuals began to take the cinema seriously when Hollywood movies arrived en masse in 1946, after Léon Blum ended the wartime ban. They were trying to work out a way of responding to the abundance of new images. Rohmer’s first ...”

“... period, at the moment he became a monument: there are those he counted as friends (Gertrude Stein, Jean-Paul Sartre) and those he had little time for (André Gide, Jean Cocteau); there’s his wrangling with dealers and gallerists; there’s his involvement with the Communist Party, which he joined in 1944, because one ‘goes to the ...”

“... the moment it is in the nature of things that we may need to counter racism with what Jean-Paul Sartre has called an anti-racist racism, to announce not just that we are as good as the next man but that we are much better.’ This is a disastrous statement for an artist to make, but no worse than this mixture of threat and abject repudiation ...”

“... a racial phenomenon – that is, to qualities ascribed by Gentiles to Jews: a process described by Jean-Paul Sartre in his brilliant Portrait of the Anti-Semite. Rejecting the Jewish religion as well as Jewish nationality, Freud writes to the B’nai B’rith fraternity: ‘But enough else remained to make the attraction of Judaism and of Jews so ...”

“... from the start. Fabian of the Yard shot through a Dostoevsky filter. Sexton Blake ghosted by Jean-Paul Sartre. The ‘General Contract’ Cook called it, the vulture on the shoulder. Vulture ventriloquism. Death and poetry. Raymond doesn’t write about poetry, he is poetry. Although, like James, he’s fond of a good quotation – Eliot, or ...”

“... in France to have given its name to Les Temps modernes, the heavyweight journal founded in 1945 by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Jour de fête’s American movies and military policemen have been replaced as emblems of modernity by a whole array (or system) of identikit structures and institutions. Playtime required the construction, at vast ...”

“... By 1938 Camus was in charge of the paper’s literary pages, and one of the books he reviewed was Jean-Paul Sartre’s first novel, La Nausée. He immediately recognised that Sartre shared his own concern with the ‘absurdity of life’, but he was also impressed by Sartre’s ...”

“... In lieu of Sartre and Raymond Aron, future historians of French intellectuals in the Eighties and Nineties may well be condemned to structuring their narratives around the post-Marx brothers of French intellectual life, Bernard-Henri Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut. This is not a case simply of contemporary thinkers being dwarfed by the giants of the past – the familiar lament about the decline of French intellectuals is rather unfair ...”