PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Simone Weil (Author) Simone Weil (1909-43) was a French political activist, mystic, and a singular figure in French philosophy. She studied at the elite cole Normale Superieure, obtained her agregation (teaching diploma) in philosophy in 1931, worked at Renault from 1934 to 1935, enlisted in the International Brigades in 1936 and worked as a farm labourer in 1941. She left France in 1942 for New York and then London, where she worked for General de Gaulle's Free French movement. Most of her works, published posthumously, consist of some notebooks and a collection of religious essays. They include, in English, Waiting for God (1951), Gravity and Grace (1952), The Need for Roots (1952), Notebooks (2 vol., 1956), Oppression and Liberty (1958), and Selected Essays, 1934-1943 (1962).
This is one of those books which ought to be studied by the young before their leisure has been lost and their capacity for thought destroyed; books the effect of which, we can only hope, will become apparent in the attitude of mind of another generation -- T. S. Eliot The patron saint of all outsiders -- André Gide The only great spirit of our time -- Albert Camus
