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....

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....

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....

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

An original, illuminating history of the northern European Renaissance in art, science, and philosophy, which often rivaled its Italian counterpart.

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

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

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

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

"If we accept Wittgenstein's word for it," Paul Strathern writes, "he is the last philosopher....

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....

From a young age, James Joyce showed a precocious and original intellect and a confidence in his own artistic destiny....

Augustine's struggles with sex and a domineering mother, followed by his spiritual crisis and conversion to Christianity ultimately led him to his major contribution to philosophy....

Acclaimed historian Paul Strathern tells the vivid story of The Age of Reason, while also exploring the painful cost of creating the progress and modernity upon which the Western world was built.

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

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

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....

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....

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....

David Hume reduced philosophy to ruins: he denied the existence of everything, except our actual perceptions themselves....