Originally from Brussels, Patrick Baert completed his doctoral work at the University of Oxford and has taught at Cambridge for more than 20 years. His interests are wide, ranging from philosophy and sociology to history and politics. More recently, he has written on French intellectual history in the 1940s and on the question whether the public intellectual is in decline. In his forthcoming book The Existentialist Moment, he provides an account for how at the end of the Second World War Sartre became an overnight sensation.