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....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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....

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....

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

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

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

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....

Virginia Woolf in 90 Minutes offers a concise, expert account of Woolf's life and ideas and explains their influence on literature and on man's struggle to understand his place in the world....

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

This audiobook offers a concise, expert account of Lawrence's life and ideas and explains their influence on literature and on man's struggle to understand his place in the world....

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....