Five things you didn’t know about Simone de Beauvoir:

1. ‘Over the moon’ was one of her favourite expressions.
2. She kept a plaster cast of Sartre’s hands on the living roomtable.
3. She referred to herself and Sartre as ‘the elves’.
4. Lover Nelson Algren’s American phone number was listed under her name to tease the FBI.
5. Forget fashion: she first wore the famous turban to conceal an ill-executed bob cut.

I was hoping to offer the customary twenty, but seven hundred and fifty pages of Deirdre Bair’s biography didn’t yield anymore, despite the clearly effortful labour of ten years’ research. The reader emerges from confinement etiolated, weary, possibly reluctant to read another word by or about Simone de Beauvoir and yet with no clearer impression of the woman than that supplied by Elliott Irwitt’s photograph on the jacket.

This is not entirely Bair’s fault, given the millions of contradictory words already clouding the character of Tante Simone. Source material springs anew each day as friends publish their memoirs, academics play the revisionism game and Gallimard metes out another pertinent volume on the Terrible Two. Just to distort the