Simone De Beauvoir

Our middle years have had a makeover thanks to some excellent recent literature

After decades of campaigning by the suffragettes, a 1918 Act gave a limited cohort of women the right to vote in parliamentary elections

A year after the Harvey Weinstein revelations, a professor decided to do some deep reading

Film director most well known for ‘Shoah’ which he spent 12 years making

Iris Murdoch, Edna O’Brien, Marian Keyes and Eimear McBride all appear on the list

Housing, shame and isolation among concerns in ‘Ethical Stakes of Ageing’ report

Long after existentialist philosopher’s death, simmering rivalry links protagonists

Patrick Freyne: This is where the experiment in democratic self-governance has led

Terminations and related expenses are covered by state with 211,900 performed in 2016

Paris Letter: France mourns Jeanne Moreau, an actor of fierce intelligence

Unthinkable: Examples include ‘women being pressured – not quite to the point of outright coercion – to have sex, or to have sex without contraception’, says philosopher Ann Cahill

Sometimes it just takes a little role-play to ensure you end up with the desired result

'No beige', says Carleton Viney, who has been asked to redesign the next US ambassador's Phoenix Park residence

When truth becomes wholly disposable we are endangered beyond measure

Irish governments have been slow to draw on philosophers, argues Joseph Mahon

You’ve met a kind, loving person but you don’t want them, you want the broody narcissist: why?

Evelyn Conlon: ‘Art allows us – dares us – to let the imagination take the reins, wander to the edge of time or wherever suggests an answer ... to lift us out of the political maelstrom’

Deadliest violence to strike France since 1945 was probably the mass killing of Algerians by Paris police in 1961

Satirical wit, freewheeling sexuality and a new wave cinematic sensibility? François Ozon, director of ‘Sitcom’, ‘Swimming Pool’ and, now, ‘The New Girlfriend’, is a most French film-maker, and despite Hollywood overtures he refuses to change his style

The City of Lights changes, but the Left Bank has retained its classic old-school charm down through the centuries

How a simple question began thousands of conversations and got a celebration started

Ciarán Clark has brought the Outhouse centre’s library back to life and created a city centre gem in the process

The maligned look, which originated in US women’s colleges, is making a comeback

‘If you ever stop deconstructing God and then reconstructing God, you get an idol’

Economies undervalue ‘women’s work’ – but are men to blame?

In these three edited extracts from his latest book, Rod Stoneman examines the real story behind sometimes misleading photographs of Che Guevara, the fall of Berlin and Ernest Hemingway

André Schiffrin: June 14th, 1935-December 1st, 2013

The writer, always his own man, refused to take sides on Algeria and was an anti-Soviet leftist even though it led to a rupture with fellow intellectual Sartre

Magazine petition from group of French intellectuals comes under fire from feminists

World View: EU commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn made a strong pitch for the indispensability of the humanities in understanding issues such as climate change