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Lead book review

Sartre, de Beauvoir and Sheffield teenagers; the weird glamour of existentialism

Sarah Bakewell reminds us how popular — and de rigueur — the philosophy once was, even though very few people understood it

27 February 2016

9:00 AM

27 February 2016

9:00 AM

At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails Sarah Bakewell

Chatto, pp.440, £16.99, ISBN: 9780701186586

I’m certainly the wrong person to be reviewing this book, never having succeeded in understanding anything that a philosopher said about anything — but particularly the collected utterances of the existentialist school. Nevertheless, I think it fair to say that between the ages of 15 and 18, I had the wardrobe down to a T.

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