Opinion: Brexistentialism: Britain, the drop out nation in crisis, meets Jean-Paul Sartre
11 July 2016Andy Martin (Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages) discusses existentialism and the EU referendum.
Opinion: How to write a best-selling novel
05 April 2016Andy Martin (Department of French) discusses the "magic potion" for writing a thriller.
Opinion: The man with no plot: how I watched Lee Child write a Jack Reacher novel
30 November 2015Andy Martin (Department of French) discusses the year he spent sitting behind author Lee Child as he wrote the latest Jack Reacher novel.
Beauty and despair
11 June 2012A high level inquiry reported last month that more than half of the British public has a negative body image. Cambridge academic Andy Martin reflects on the idea of beauty and our pursuit of the unattainable.
Locked in combat: two French thinkers slog it out
31 May 2012“Hell is other people,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre. His rival on the stage of occupied and post-war Paris was Albert Camus (“I am the world”). The two fell out but remained entangled. A book by Cambridge academic Andy Martin – The Boxer and the Goalkeeper – is an excursion into the worlds of the Frenchmen synonymous with existentialism and absurdism.
New York, unplugged: a day without words
02 November 2011We are addicted to language. By way of proof, Andy Martin – lecturer in the Department of French and author of books on Napoleon, Bardot and surfing – takes a vow of silence. Spending a day in New York without words, he discovers a liking for one of the most over-used expressions of the era.
