Jean Lacouture’s biography of André Malraux leaves space for differing views of its great subject. Charles Nicol

MALRAUX’S FATE

Smoking cigarettes like a tree dropping leaves in a high wind, an intense, nervous man with a rippling facial tic, Malraux was so full of energy he could not sit still. We know him primarily as an author; the French know him as a Renaissance man more interested in variety than consistency, more excited by action than by art.