I've often been wary of works that combine philosophy with biography, purely because it's so hard to get the balance to work without one side, as it were, eclipsing the other. It probably comes partly from my experiences as a philosophy teacher, urging them to forget how Socrates died or Plato's romantic preferences and dissect the bloody arguments.
In a way, then, I'm envious at how well Bakewell pulls it off. It helps that it's existentialism, of course, which, despite what some think, is perhaps the most practical and action-driven of all philosophical schools. Sartre and De Beauvoir's workaholic tendencies and diverse sexual explorations are perhaps easy to blend with their philosophical journeys: they lived their ideas even to the point of falling out over them, most notoriously in the ideological spats between Sartre and Camus. Camus comes out best, I think, but only because Sartre's habit from jumping from one political bandwagon to the next left him, at times, occupying ill-advised ideological territory.
Heidegger is a much trickier nut to crack in this respect. Bakewell doesn't shirk the Nazi involvement, nor do her attempts to square the circle with his earlier philosophical ideas seek easy answers. He's a conundrum and Bakewell possesses the intellectual honesty to leave that largely as something for us to figure out, neither sugar-coating his philosophical ideas nor overlooking the impact of his more monstrous convictions.
Husserl, meanwhile, is granted the status, deservingly, of providing the phenomenological rock on which existentialist philosophy was built. Yet perhaps the figure who is most compelling swoops only fleetingly in and out of the the story. Jean Genet, mentioned largely in the context of Sartre's biography of him, stands out perhaps as the individual who lived and wrote existentialist ideas most honestly. If only I could now go back and use some of this rewrite that essay on The Maids, which I pretty much bombed out on in the finals of my Eng. Lit. degree.
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