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

In a note to Merleau-Ponty, Sonia Brownell wrote that she’d just had lunch with some French writers in London who could not stop gabbling about the battles they intended to fight on Paris’ streets, and the best way of making petrol bombs.