Merleau-Ponty was a friend of Sartre and Beauvoir (until they fell out), and a phenomenologist who specialised in questions of the body and perception. He was also a brilliant essayist. I became diverted from Montaigne into the volume’s other essays, and then to Merleau-Ponty’s main work The Phenomenology of Perception. I was amazed afresh at how adventurous and rich his thinking was. No wonder I used to love this sort of thing! From Merleau-Ponty, I went on to revisit Simone de Beauvoir — whose autobiography I’d discovered during a long student summer selling ice creams on a grey, dismal
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