Paul Strathern

Against the background of an age that saw the rebirth of ancient and classical learning, Paul Strathern explores the intensely dramatic rise and fall of the Medici family....

Spinoza's system and conclusions have compelling beauty unequaled in the history of philosophy....

Kierkegaard wasn't really a philosopher in the academic sense....

After narrowly avoiding a firing squad when he was just twenty-eight years old, Dostoevsky never took things lightly....

Death in Florence illuminates one of the defining moments in Western history - the bloody and dramatic story of the battle for the soul of Renaissance Florence....

In an age when philosophers had scarcely glimpsed the horizons of the mind, a boy named Aristocles decided to forgo his ambitions as a wrestler....

Immanuel Kant taught and wrote prolifically about physical geography yet never traveled further than forty miles from his home in Kvnigsberg....

The Borgia family have become a byword for evil. Corruption, incest, ruthless megalomania, avarice, and vicious cruelty - all have been associated with their name. And yet, paradoxically, this family lived when the Renaissance was coming into its full flowering in Italy....

Garcia Marquez stands on the shoulders of a great Latin American literary heritage, but he is a modern rarity: a writer with aspirations to high art who also remains hugely popular....

The Republic of Venice was the first great economic, cultural, and naval power of the modern Western world....

Schopenhauer, the "philosopher of pessimism", makes it very plain that he regards the world and our life in it as a bad joke....

A handsome recluse, plagued by indecision and hypochondria, Kafka nonetheless exhibited an extraordinary strength....

Heidegger needed to develop an entire new form of philosophy....

With Friedrich Nietzsche, philosophy was dangerous not only for philosophers but for everyone....

With Hegel, philosophy became very difficult indeed. His dialectical method produced the most grandiose metaphysical system known to man....

Confucius knew all about life and told us how to behave, but we can't find out precisely what he was up to....

During his lifetime, Jean-Paul Sartre enjoyed unprecedented popularity for a philosopher, due partly to his role as a spokesman for existentialism at the opportune moment....

We see our age as the greatest in human history, filled with seemingly unending originality. Yet such dynamism is not a necessary characteristic of great eras....

Aristotle wrote on everything from the shape of seashells to sterility, from speculations on the nature of the soul to meteorology, poetry, art, and even the interpretation of dreams....

Just a century after it had begun, philosophy entered its greatest age with the appearance of Socrates....