This year marks the seventieth anniversary of Simone Weil’s death. In 1943, still in her thirties, she succumbed to a range of conditions and died in England, not quite alone, but certainly unregarded. Her formidable reputation was to follow. In many ways this frail, passionate and candid writer was the epitome of the mid-century thinker. In viewing her life, we see almost every contradiction that could possibly characterise the life and times of an intellectual trying to live authentically in a world adrift. Simone Weil was a philosopher. But she would probably have rejected that description as a single-word…