Polemical novels, such as The Fountainhead (1943), of primarily known Russian-American writer Ayn Rand, originally Alisa Rosenbaum, espouse the doctrines of objectivism and political libertarianis…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of culture, who became one of the most influential of all modern thinkers. He began his career as a classical philol…
Émile Zola was a prominent French novelist, journalist, and playwright widely regarded as a key figure in the development of literary naturalism. His work profoundly influenced both literature and soc…
Franz Kafka was a German-speaking writer from Prague whose work became one of the foundations of modern literature, even though he published only a small part of his writing during his lifetime. Born …
Arthur Schopenhauer was born in the city of Danzig (then part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth; present day Gdańsk, Poland) and was a German philosopher best known for his work The World as Will …
Public condemned Les fleurs du mal (1857), obscene only volume of French writer, translator, and critic Charles Pierre Baudelaire; expanded in 1861, it exerted an enormous influence over later sym…
Paul Strathern (born 1940) is a English writer and academic. He was born in London, and studied at Trinity College, Dublin, after which he served in the Merchant Navy over a period of two years. He th…
Vidyadhara Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (Tibetan: ཆོས་ རྒྱམ་ དྲུང་པ་ Wylie: Chos rgyam Drung pa; also known as Dorje Dradul of Mukpo, Surmang Trungpa, after his monastery, or Chökyi Gyatso, of which Chögy…
Carr was born in Thirsk Junction, Carlton Miniott, Yorkshire, into a Wesleyan Methodist family. His father Joseph, the eleventh son of a farmer, went to work for the railways, eventually becoming a st…
Heraclitus of Ephesus (Greek: Ἡράκλειτος ὁ Ἐφέσιος,c.535 – c.475 BCE) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, a native of the Greek city Ephesus, Ionia, on the coast of Asia Minor. He was of distinguish…
Ilan Pappé is a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the UK, director of the university's European Centre for Palestine Studies, co-di…
According to tradition, Padmasambhava was incarnated as an eight-year-old child appearing in a lotus blossom floating in Lake Dhanakosha, in the kingdom of Uddiyana, traditionally identified with the …
Marcel Proust was a French novelist, best known for his 3000 page masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), a pseudo-autobiographical novel told…
Sue Prideaux is an Anglo-Norwegian novelist and biographer. She has strong links to Norway and her godmother was painted by Edvard Munch, whose biography she later wrote under the title Edvard Munch: …
Byung-Chul Han, also spelled Pyŏng-ch'ŏl Han (born 1959 in Seoul), is a German author, cultural theorist, and Professor at the Universität der Künste Berlin (UdK) in Berlin, Germany.
Ross Gregory Douthat is a conservative American author, blogger and New York Times columnist. He was a senior editor at The Atlantic and is author of Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling…
Tomasi was born in Palermo to Giulio Maria Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa and Duke of Palma di Montechiaro, and Beatrice Mastrogiovanni Tasca Filangieri di Cutò. He became an only child after the death (…
