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leer en español         If nothing means anything, what’s the point – in anything? Love, hope, dreams, desire, having babies – existence? This was the conundrum Albert Camus wrestled with after the slaughter of the Second World War when Europe lay in ruins and the future looked as grey as the past. Post-war writers rejected the notion of a caring God and sought meaning in new isms and new ways at looking at the world. Camus set out aged 22 to explore nihilism – the philosophy founded in Russia before the revolution and championed by André Breton. As he studied nihilism, he slipped into those dark places of the mind where shadows lengthen, and reptiles lay their eggs. He finally clawed himself out of the mental quick sands into the misty fields of existentialism ploughed by Jean-Paul...