Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir is remembered today as the pioneering feminist author of The Second Sex and a close companion of Jean Paul Sartre. But the scope of her intellectual contribution has long been underestimated, argues her latest biographer Kate Kirkpatrick, who offers an introduction to the landscape of Beauvoir’s works, from fiction to philosophy to life writing.

What is love? Can you choose to do it? If love ends, was it really love? The author and academic Skye C Cleary selects five key texts that deal with philosophy of love, whether romantic, erotic, familial or platonic.

The celebrated feminist gives us her view of essential reading for women – and says the gender revolution is far from over

The freedom to pick up a book is something we take almost for granted today but women readers have faced all manner of obstacles throughout history, says Professor Belinda Jack, author of The Woman Reader. She recommends five key texts in the history of women readers.

Is old age necessarily degrading? Should we leave home in our final years? Is there ever a good time to go? Novelist, biographer and critic Dame Margaret Drabble, now aged 80, discusses the difficult questions that arise as we age—and recommends five books that examine them in depth.

As questions of identity become a focus of political debate, interest in existentialism has been booming once more. Here, the philosopher Jonathan Webber discusses five classic books dealing with existentialist themes that deserve a bigger audience.