Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrote seven novels: Adam Bede (1859)…
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…
Plato (Greek: Πλάτων), born Aristocles (c. 427 – 348 BC), was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Classical period who is considered a foundational thinker in Western philosophy and an innovator of t…
Sophocles (497/496 BC-406/405 BC), (Greek: Σοφοκλής; German: Sophokles, Russian: Софокл, French: Sophocle) was an ancient Greek tragedian, known as one of three from whom at least one …
Walter Whitman Jr. was an American poet, essayist, and journalist. He is considered one of the most influential poets in American literature. Whitman incorporated both transcendentalism and realism in…
Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890…
Wilkie Collins was an English novelist and playwright, best known for The Woman in White (1860), an early sensation novel, and The Moonstone (1868), a pioneering work of detective fiction. Born to lan…
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…
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, socialist, and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he…
Anne Rice (born Howard Allen Frances O'Brien) was a best-selling American author of gothic, supernatural, historical, erotica, and later religious themed books. Best known for The Vampire Chronicles, …
Genevan philosopher and writer Jean Jacques Rousseau held that society usually corrupts the essentially good individual; his works include The Social Contract and Émile (both 1762).
Thomas Hobbes was a British philosopher and a seminal thinker of modern political philosophy. His ideas were marked by a mechanistic materialist foundation, a characterization of human nature based on…
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…
Adam Smith FRSA FRS FRSE was a Scottish philosopher and economist who was a pioneer in thinking on political economy and a key figure during the Scottish…
Sir Isaiah Berlin was a philosopher and historian of ideas, regarded as one of the leading liberal thinkers of the twentieth century. He excelled as an essayist, lecturer and conversationalist; and as…
Ha-Joon Chang is a South Korean institutional economist, specializing in development economics. Currently he is a reader in the Political Economy of Development at the University of Cambridge.
Richard Jenkyns is emeritus Professor of the Classical Tradition and the Public Orator at the University of Oxford. His books include Virgil's Experience and Victorians and Ancient Greece, acclaimed a…
Douglas Kear Murray is a British neoconservative writer and commentator. He was the director of the Centre for Social Cohesion from 2007 until 2011, and is currently an associate director of the Henry…
People consider that Russian writer Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (Николай Васильевич Гоголь) founded realism in Russian literature. His works include The Overcoat (1842) and Dead Souls (1842).
Russell Jacoby (born April 23, 1945) is a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), an author and a critic of academic culture. His fields of interest are twentieth-cen…
I was born in Reading (not great, but it could have been Slough), studied Ancient and Modern History at New College, Oxford, and I've got a PhD in art history from the University of Sussex.
Friedrich August von Hayek CH was an Austrian and British economist and philosopher known for his defense of classical liberalism and free-market capitalism against socialist and collectivist thought.…
Herbert George Wells was born to a working class family in Kent, England. Young Wells received a spotty education, interrupted by several illnesses and family difficulties, and became a draper's appre…
A preoccupation with sexual violence characterizes novels, plays, and short stories that Donatien Alphonse François, comte de Sade but known as marquis de Sade, of France wrote. After this writer deri…
His debut novel Jū (The Gun) won the Shinchō New Author Prize in 2002. Also received the Noma Prize for New Writers in 2004 for Shakō [The Shade]. Winner of the Akutagawa Prize in 2005 for Tsuchi no n…
