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Unbearable witness

A new light on Simone Weil
by
October 2025, no. 480

A Life in Letters by Robert Chevanier and André A. Devaux, translated from French by Nicholas Elliott

Belknap Press, US$37.95 hb, 384 pp

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Unbearable witness

A new light on Simone Weil
by
October 2025, no. 480

In his otherwise bleak 1963 novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John le Carré lets himself have a little fun with the character of Elizabeth Gold. She is an idealistic Jewish woman in her mid-twenties who works in a small library in the London neighbourhood of Bayswater. She is also a member of the British Communist Party. For Liz, however, membership is less a matter of ideology than a token of her moral commitment to peace work and the alleviation of poverty. She is disdainful of her local branch, with its petty ambitions to be ‘a decent little club, nice and revolutionary and no fuss’ – unlike her comrades in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), whose determined struggle against the militarism and decadence of the capitalist West she admires from afar.

A Life in Letters

A Life in Letters

by Robert Chevanier and André A. Devaux, translated from French by Nicholas Elliott

Belknap Press, US$37.95 hb, 384 pp

Buy this book

ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent.

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