Paul Strathern

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....

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....

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

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

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

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

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

In Rousseau we encounter a walking ego, naked sensibility. Feeling triumphs over intellectual argument in his works, which are both deeply stirring and deeply inconsistent....

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

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....

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

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

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

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....

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

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....

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

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

Rene Descartes spent most of his childhood in solitude, a situation that also came to characterize his adult life....