de Beauvoir and Iris Murdoch

I don't often see the New York Review of Books, but I was trekking high up with a group of friends recently, with no access to papers, so we swapped our reading around. As a result I got to see a fascinating review by Elaine Blair of Kate Kirkpatrick's biography of de Beauvoir (accompanied by an elegant cartoon by Karl Stevens of deB at a cafe table, fag hanging from lower lip). I have always admired not just deB's brilliance, but the fact that she opened up not just gender but old age as fields for politics as well as philosophy. That's two pretty major strikes. The review argues that…
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