The third volume of Simone de Beauvoir's acclaimed autobiography.

In this frank account the personalities and ideas of Europes leading artists and intellectuals crowd the pages, from Genet and Leduc to Koestler and Aron, and fresh light is thrown on Sartre's famous quarrel with Camus.

Force of Circumstance is also a record of unflinching commitment in the cold-war politics of the Berlin airlift, Vietnam, Suez, Cuba (which Mme de Beauvoir visited in the springtime of its revolution) and the Algerian liberation struggle.

But above all it exposes with unique insight her most intimate problems and preoccupations - her notoriety in middle age, her affair with Nelson Algren, her unconventional relationship with Sartre ('one undoubted success in my life') and her thoughts on the life and death of herself and her friends.