And that must have been exacerbated greatly by the war, the Franco-Algerian War, in which, again, he's trying to sort of be true to himself and he can't agree with everyone and he finds himself rather isolated again, doesn't he?

That's right, yes.

And I think that one of the things about him that is perhaps most, I would say, it was idealistic or came from a perhaps willed lack of political literacy for someone who was hugely politically literate was his inability to Well, not his inability as such, but his continued belief that there was a middle way in the Algerian War of Independence and liberation from France.

You know, he fell foul yet again, I think, of a number of intellectual currents and still to some degree does today.

But I think what I would say about Camus, and I was thinking about it today as I was coming to speak, I was trying to think about what are the criticisms one would level at him in terms of his, let's say, political consciousness, his philosophy, and so on.

Because I think his novels are remarkable.

I think that there are...

Patrick, what was his relationship to his own writing, to his novels, but not only his novels, his plays, his essays? What did he think of his oeuvre? You mentioned that it is an oeuvre, that he's always thinking in terms of a body of work rather than individual writing of cycles of works.