At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others

by Sarah Bakewell

As the English surrealist poet David Gascoyne, then living in Paris in a delicate state of mind, wrote in his journal during that week, ‘What is so detestable about war is that it reduces the individual to complete insignificance.’