Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir and Me – a Memoir

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On the result: “Two good teams going at it, fine margins and all that. At the start of the game we coughed up penalties and gave them field position and six points. Earlier this year, Michael Peppiatt’s The Existential Englishman: Paris Among the Artists was published; the book displays namedropping and some Parisian familières, and ended up as quite the end note of what can be written about celebrities, and Paris. It is the kind of book that most people will forget about when asked of their favourite autobiographies, six months after having read it.

Sometimes the right book at the right time just falls into your lap - such is the case with this one. Originally, I was interested in reading Bair's biography of Simone de Beauvoir when I saw that she had recently published this book - after looking through the description, it sounded like something I might enjoy, so I decided to give it a try. Saint Augustine provided the answer for what drew me to Beauvoir: I had become “a question to myself. Not even I understand everything that I am.” And Rousseau gave me hope that sustained me during each biography, but especially within this bio-memoir: “My purpose is to display a portrait in every way true to nature, and the person I portray will be myself. Simply myself.” Police in Paris have opened fire today on a woman who allegedly made threatening remarks and shouted "Allahu akbar" on a train. New Zealand's players are doing a lap of honour around the pitch, with the Irish support applauding them in return.

Armed officers were then deployed to Bibliothèque François-Mitterrand station to isolate the woman, understood to still be on the train, and the station was evacuated. Bair penned stunning, intimate biographies of these two famously reticent literary giants, both of whom lived on the same Parisian street and studiously avoided each other. Here the author recalls her encounters with the pair – prepare to be transported. Dead Famous: An Unexpected History of Celebrity from Bronze Age to Silver Screen by Greg Jenner ( W&N) Lots of people wrote to her, especially young women and especially philosophy students like me, and she always replied,” she says.

But when I went to America a bit later they looked pretty incongruous. So then I bought some more clothes at a store in New York. I had a lovely time: I bought a white coat, beautifully made – I still wear it – and a fur coat. I don’t know what sort it was but it was all fluffy. I had some money there you see, because of my writing.

The enigma of female friendship that is as intense as a love affair, but that is not sexually expressed is always an interesting subject. Yet, while Sylvie, as a teenager, listens to Andrée speaking of her passion for her male cousin – she has taken up kissing him and now smokes Gauloises – she also owns her emotions. They teach you in catechism to respect your body. So selling your body in marriage must be as bad as selling it on the street,” Andrée says. Bair’s account of their sessions together are a case study in rival strategies of reticence and disclosure. When the interviews went well, the pair concluded with a Scotch that had been judiciously watered down by De Beauvoir’s companion and adopted daughter, Sylvie. On other occasions, Bair’s questioning was met with sudden rage; once, she was pushed by De Beauvoir out of the front door. Then in my second year I started to wear a skirt and sweaters. Some of the sweaters were rather special. There was one in angora and another with bands of colour across the front, and my students used to copy them. The long conversations between Andrée and Sylvie about property, justice and equality are nothing less than a revolution at a time when girls and women were encouraged to keep their thoughts to themselves.

Andrée Gallard. I’m nine. If I look younger it’s because I got burned alive and didn’t grow much after that. I had to stop studying for a year but Maman wants me to catch up on what I missed. Can you lend me your notebooks from last year?’ There was a period in which the publication was in doubt. Again Bair held her own and persevered. But her tenure and professorship was put in jeopardy. There is much that society will throw at Andrée to intimidate and flatten her, not least religion and the desire not to disappoint her controlling, conservative mother. And to make life as complicated as it actually is – which novelists must do – Andrée loves her mother. Sylvie can jealously see that all other attachments are not as important to her friend. How can she compete with this maternal bond?It was going to be rounded to a 3, but I do like intelligent people and - Deidre Bair, I see what you did there. I see how, by the end of the book I have decided to finally read Murphy that has been languishing for years on my bookshelf and also some of SDB. Always putting the subjects first. It would appear a biographer is the closest thing to a selfless martyr in the literary world. The avuncular pop scribe writes two books in one here: a vivid memoir of Brum-based Greek-Cypriot family life in the 70s, intertwined with recollections of the era’s pop stars and their relative merits as potential childminders. Warm and eccentric, it’s rightly being talked up as the Fever Pitch of pop. Fake Love Letters, Forged Telegrams, and Prison Escape Maps: Designing Graphic Props for Filmmaking by Annie Atkins ( Phaidon) At 80, Le Bon de Beauvoir, like De Beauvoir a former philosophy professor, is a strikingly elegant and discreet figure who in the 35 years since the writer’s death has rarely spoken at length or written about her love for De Beauvoir, partly, she suggests, to shield herself.