"If you could travel back in time to 1945 and to a café in Paris
called Les Deux Magots (‘The Two Wise Men’), you would find
yourself sitting near a small man with goggly eyes. He is
smoking a pipe and writing in a notebook. This man is Jean-
Paul Sartre (1905–80), the most famous existentialist philoso-
pher. He was also a novelist, playwright and biographer. He
lived most of his life in hotels and did most of his writing in
cafés. He didn’t look like a cult figure, but within a few years
that’s what he would become."