The Woman Destroyed (Simone De Beauvoir)

The Mandarins was my first foray into Simone de Beauvoir's writings - a thwarted foray, as it turned out, because my charity shop copy was already worse for wear, and was worsened yet further by its own forays in a steamy bathroom, which is often the most serene place to devour a book but not an atmosphere much beloved of paper!

Yet, I knew from my meagre sampling of The Mandarins that I wanted to delve further into de Beauvoir's literary contributions. I was to wait some years before the opportunity presented itself... in one of those non-coincidental happenings, I came upon the second volume of her autobiography, and was settling down to learn about her early life with Sartre in Paris, only to then find a copy of The Woman Destroyed some weeks later.

Comprising three short stories, of which the opening and closing ones are the most accessible, The Woman Destroyed opens a dystopic window onto the lives of middle-aged women. That at least seems to be its intention. Certainly, the stories are moving: charting the desperation to cling on to past life, love and vigour, they bring to mind a sympathetic image of fingernails clinging on to a crumbling cliff side that is inexorably falling into the yawning abyss of post-menopausal life.

Goodness, the stories are sad. But "woman destroyed"? No, not really. Ultimately, the significant others of these women come off no better, no less destroyed by the loss of past certainties, the loss of youth. Here then, is a version of how some of us may face advancing age.

And in fact, this tracing of a particular milieu, this fictionalised spotlight on the observed realities of her times - fictionalised ethnography, if you like - is ultimately what makes Simone de Beauvoir so accessible and so very worth reading.

What's going on? The meanderings of a comic mind in confusion (Mark Steel)

Steel's comedy comes from a place that only fellow socialists have visited. But it's nice to know that staunch Thatcherites like Bob Monkhouse found it engaging, raging political gulf notwithstanding.

I came to Steel's "Reasons To Be Cheerful" in my late twenties, by way of an inspiring socialist mentor who, to my great chagrin and inconsolable disillusionment, was exposed as a champagne socialist... luckily only after they also turned me on to Dylan and Gramsci.

RTBC felt like speaking with an old friend - the best friend who knows your heart and your mind, and can finish off your sentences with pleasing accuracy while saying much more than you were even able to formulate in your own head. I think that I owe my ability to look back with wryness on my Thatcher-infested youth to...well, Mark Steel.

And with "What's Going On?" he releases the same genius: managing to make a very astute social and political point, while giving it depth through irrefutable argument and fact, and drawing you to tearful laughter. But what really blew me away is how once again Steel managed to restore that sense of conversing with an old friend, and tapped into precisely the confusion assailing me as a socialist.

After a very Citizen Smith-like youth - carried through with probably more gaucheness and less panache than Robert Lindsey - Steel is ensconced in life as a Middle Englander approaching a mid-life crisis. And he begins to question his relationship with socialism. It's a truism that we become more conservative s we get older, and while I read the book willing Steel not to adhere to this trite cliche, somehow I knew it was coming.

Steel closes with a scene in which he's on the phone to the bank to cancel his subscription to the Socialist Worker, following which end to life as he's known it, his daughter reminds him of a promised shopping trip, and he dutifully takes her to Woolworth's to buy colouring pens. As I write this, I have to pause for a moment - just as I did when I first came to the passage in the book.

Why should one man's waning relationship with socialism - if that is in fact what it is - touch me so fiercely? Precisely because he seems to be telling me his story as an old friend might; precisely because he enunciates every twist and turn I've experienced in my relationship with socialism.

I had just come to the end of "What's Going On?" when an old friend - real, rather than imagined - sent me a facebook message detailing the inspiration they'd found in Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged". He'd long promised to write at length about the book, and suddenly here it was, the deliverance of his promise. I felt betrayed. I felt that this old friend's sense of social justice should have been beyond corruption, yet here he was spouting about the beauty of capitalism.

I was less understanding perhaps than I should have been, more intransigent to be sure to the sudden streak of capitalism. But Steel does this to you; he digs deep into the well of your socialist belief and brings it rippling out to the surface, like a splash of cold invigorating water. I wouldn't have it any other way. Nor, I think, would Mark Steel.