Olivier Todd is a French-born novelist, author, television journalist and war correspondent who, as the biographer of Albert Camus, has attacked the ‘logorrhoea’ of fashionable French penseurs.

Todd is a sometimes controversial Anglophone French intellectual. After studying philosophy he has criticised the French philosophical tradition as being more committed to poetic expression than clarity. After served in the French army in Morocco he wrote critical book about his experiences, with a foreword by his friend Jean-Paul Sartre. As a journalist he has broadcast for both the BBC and French television and written for both the Times Literary Supplement and the Nouvel Observateur. He has also somehow found time to write eight novels.