Christopher Bray

The socialist thinker who imagined ‘transforming her body and soul into potatoes’ to feed the poor

Of Wolfram Eilenberger’s four intellectual heroines, Simone Weil alone really counts as a ‘visionary’, forsaking philosophy for a kind of saintly mysticism

Simone Weil – the only one of the foursome who really counts as a visionary. In the second world war she imagined feeding the poor by ‘transforming her body and soul into potatoes’. [Getty Images]
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  • The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil and the Salvation of Philosophy

    Wolfram Eilenberger, translated by Shaun Whiteside

    Allen Lane, pp. 386, £25

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