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. Apart from mathematics, he transformed every field of knowledge that he touched. Above all, Aristotle is credited with the founding of logic. When he first divided human knowledge into separate categories, he enabled our understanding of the world to develop in a systematic fashion.

In Aristotle in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Aristotle’s life and ideas and explains their influence on man’s struggle to understand his existence in the world. The book also includes selections from Aristotle’s work, a brief list of suggested readings for those who wish to delve deeper, and chronologies that place Aristotle within his own age and in the broader scheme of philosophy.

Samuel Beckett’s work evokes passionate responses: readers and playgoers either revere it or consider it a load of pretentious nonsense. But his philosophy of pessimism will always find a new generation of young readers, for it bursts the rainbow soap bubbles of illusion, leaving us blinking with stinging eyes at unremitting reality. Beckett’s defeatism was no soft choice: he had iron in his soul and the wry humor of those who withstand all misfortune, who never admit final defeat.

Beckett in 90 Minutes offers a concise, expert account of Beckett’s life and ideas and explains their influence on literature and on man’s struggle to understand his place in the world. The book also includes a list of Beckett’s chief works, a chronology of his life and times, and recommended reading for those who wish to delve deeper.

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Weaving fiction with fact, fantastic matter with historical figures, Borges’ frequent theme of a world where time, culture, and place converge is both timely and pertinent in our advance toward globalization. Drawing from his multi-ethnic and -lingual upbringing in Argentina, Borges’ focus on universal themes early on came to belittle the sentiments of racism and communism, earning him widespread recognition. His work is both timeless and touching, a product of deep suffering and incorrigible innocence.

Borges in 90 Minutes offers a concise, expert account of Borges’ life and ideas and explains their influence on literature and on man’s struggle to understand his place in the world. The book also includes a list of Borges’ chief works, a chronology of his life and times, and recommended reading for those who wish to delve deeper.

Confucius taught a moral wisdom that would become a predominant social force in China from the second century BCE until the mid-twentieth century. It would appear that his aim was to turn his pupils into good government officials, but his quaint humanistic platitudes, maxims, and quasi-enigmatic anecdotes made spiritual fodder for the next two thousand years of the culture.

In Confucius in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Confucius’ life and ideas and explains their influence on man’s struggle to understand his existence in the world. The book also includes selections from Confucius’ work, a brief list of suggested readings for those who wish to delve deeper, and chronologies that place Confucius within his own age and in the broader scheme of philosophy.

By the end of his life, Lawrence had despaired of Western civilization, which he felt had corrupted and weakened the human spirit. He believed that we had somehow lost touch with our instinctual being and no longer responded to the ‘true voice’ of our blood. We still possessed such truth deep within us, but it was smothered by a dead culture.

His works were an attempt to revive a life we have lost, and in them it is possible to glimpse something vivid, something now damaged, that we nonetheless recognize in ourselves. At his best, Lawrence reminds us of what we are, what it is we have lost. But it is a very tenuous argument, for all the vividness with which it is evoked. In Lawrence, deep sense often coexists with empty nonsense. The ranter coexisted with the prophet, just as his often dubious message coexisted with some of the finest writing in the English language. Lawrence had a genius for evocation, both of a past that may never in fact have existed and of a luminous present that exists as never before in his words. This is his undeniable legacy.

Building on his enormously successful Philosophers in 90 Minutes series, Paul Strathern now applies his witty and incisive prose to brief biographical studies of the world’s great writers. He brings their lives and ideas to life in entertaining and accessible fashion. Far from being a novelty, each book is a highly refined appraisal of the writer and his work, authoritative and clearly presented.

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.

By the end of the fifteenth century, Florence was well established as the home of the Renaissance. As generous patrons to the likes of Botticelli and Michelangelo, the ruling Medici embodied the progressive humanist spirit of the age, and in Lorenzo de’ Medici (Lorenzo the Magnificent) they possessed a diplomat capable of guarding the militarily weak city in a climate of constantly shifting allegiances between the major Italian powers.

However, in the form of Savonarola, an unprepossessing provincial monk, Lorenzo found his nemesis. Filled with Old Testament fury and prophecies of doom, Savonarola’s sermons reverberated among a disenfranchised population, who preferred medieval biblical certainties to the philosophical interrogations and intoxicating surface glitter of the Renaissance. Savonarola’s aim was to establish a “City of God” for his followers, a new kind of democratic state, the likes of which the world had never seen before. The battle between these two men would be a fight to the death, a series of sensational events—invasions, trials by fire, the “Bonfire of the Vanities,” terrible executions, and mysterious deaths—featuring a cast of the most important and charismatic Renaissance figures.

Was this a simple clash of wills between a benign ruler and religious fanatic? Between secular pluralism and repressive extremism? In an exhilaratingly rich and deeply researched story, Paul Strathern reveals the paradoxes, self-doubts, and political compromises that made the battle for the soul of the Renaissance city one of the most complex and important moments in Western history.

René Descartes spent much of his life in solitude. Fortunately, these countless lonely hours helped Descartes produce the declaration that changed all philosophy: “I think, therefore I am.” Convincing himself to doubt and disregard sensory knowledge, Descartes found he could prove his existence through his thoughts alone. This internal reality, he believed, was the true reality, while the external was hopelessly deceiving.

In Descartes in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Descartes’s life and ideas and explains their influence on man’s struggle to understand his existence in the world. The book also includes selections from Descartes’s work, a brief list of suggested readings for those who wish to delve deeper, and chronologies that place Descartes within his own age and in the broader scheme of philosophy.

Building on his enormously successful series of Philosophers in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern now applies his witty and incisive prose to brief biographical studies of the world’s great writers. He brings their lives and ideas to life in entertaining and accessible fashion.

After narrowly avoiding a firing squad when he was just twenty-eight years old, Dostoevsky never took things lightly. His great novels burst upon the European literary scene like a succession of thunderbolts. His understanding of the darker and more extreme recesses of the human mind cast a forceful light into these areas of experience. The raw psychology and passionate involvement of his books galvanized writers and thinkers as disparate as Nietzsche and Kafka.

In Dostoevsky in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Dostoevsky’s life and ideas and explains their influence on literature and on man’s struggle to understand his place in the world. The book also includes selections from Dostoevsky’s writings and recommended reading for those who wish to delve deeper.

A dazzling new history of the world told through the ten major empires of human civilization.
Eminent historian Paul Strathern opens the story of Empire with the Akkadian civilization, which ruled over a vast expanse of the region of ancient Mesopotamia, then turns to the immense Roman Empire, where we trace back our Western and Eastern roots.
Next the narrative describes how a great deal of Western Classical culture was developed in the Abbasid and Umayyid Caliphates. Then, while Europe was beginning to emerge from a period of cultural stagnation, it almost fell to a whirlwind invasion from the East, at which point we meet the Emperors of the Mongol Empire . . .
Combining breathtaking scope with masterful narrative control, Paul Strathern traces these connections across four millennia and sheds new light on these major civilizations-from the Mongol Empire and the Yuan Dynasty to the Aztec and Ottoman, through to the most recent and biggest empires: the British, Russo-Soviet, and American.
Charting five thousand years of global history in ten lucid chapters, Empire is a must-listen for anyone fascinated by the history of the world.

García Márquez stands on the shoulders of a great Latin American literary heritage. But he is also that modern rarity, a writer with aspirations to high art who also remains hugely popular. For those who fall under his spell, his novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, is one of the richest literary dreams ever written. Its “magical realism” has influenced writers the world over.

In García Márquez in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of García Márquez’s life and ideas and explains their influence on literature and on man’s struggle to understand his place in the world.

The 90 Minutes series includes brief but authoritative interpretations of the world’s great writers, bringing their lives and ideas to life in entertaining and accessible fashion, and making them comprehensible and interesting to almost everyone.

Hegel’s dialectical method produced the most grandiose metaphysical system known to man. Its most vital element was the dialectic of the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. This sprung from Hegel’s aim to overcome the deficiencies of logic and ascend toward Mind as the ultimate reality. His view of history as a process of humanity’s self-realization inspired Marx to synthesize his philosophy of dialectical materialism.

In Hegel in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Hegel’s life and ideas and explains their influence on man’s struggle to understand his existence in the world. The book also includes selections from Hegel’s work, a brief list of suggested readings for those who wish to delve deeper, and chronologies that place Hegel within his own age and in the broader scheme of philosophy.

One of two major philosophical traditions of the twentieth century was Wittgenstein’s linguistic analysis. The other, diametrically opposed, came from Heidegger, and his fundamental question: “What is the meaning of existence?” For Heidegger, this question was beyond the reach of reason and was the primary “given” of every individual life. To confront it, Heidegger needed to develop an entirely new form of philosophy.

InHeidegger in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Heidegger’s life and ideas and explains their influence on man’s struggle to understand his existence in the world. The book also includes selections from Heidegger’s work, a brief list of suggested readings for those who wish to delve deeper, and chronologies that place Heidegger within his own age and in the broader scheme of philosophy.

The 90 Minutes series includes brief but authoritative interpretations of the world’s greatest thinkers, deciphering philosophical thought in an entertaining and accessible fashion and making it comprehensible and interesting to almost everyone.

Hume reduced philosophy to ruins: he denied the existence of everything—except our actual perceptions themselves. I alone exist, he argued, and the world is nothing more than part of my consciousness. Yet we know that the world remains, and we go on as before. What Hume expressed was the status of our knowledge about the world, a world in which neither religion nor science is certain.

In Hume in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Hume’s life and ideas and explains their influence on man’s struggle to understand his existence in the world. The book also includes selections from Hume’s work, a brief list of suggested readings for those who wish to delve deeper, and chronologies that place Hume within his own age and in the broader scheme of philosophy.

From a young age, James Joyce showed a precocious, original intellect and a confidence in his own artistic destiny. He would indeed go on to transform the nature of modern literature, employing a unique stream-of-consciousness technique rich in symbolism and wordplay. Through his art, the Dublin native sought to reveal the radiance and meaning that lurks in the everyday world, “the soul of the commonest object,” evoking a heightened sense of consciousness within the grit of common life.

James Joyce in 90 Minutes offers a concise, expert account of Joyce’s life and ideas, and explains their influence on literature and on man’s struggle to understand his place in the world. The book also includes a list of Joyce’s chief works, a chronology of his life and times, and recommended reading for those who wish to delve deeper.

A handsome recluse, plagued by indecision and hypochondria, Kafka nonetheless exhibited an extraordinary strength. He developed the uncanny ability to observe himself with cool objectivity, and he cultivated this ability in his writing, where it appeared in increasingly original metaphorical form. His works became among the greatest of the twentieth century, and his influence permeated far and wide, transcending literature. His descriptions of his attempts to escape from a self-made tyranny are his great works of art.

Kafka in 90 Minutes also includes selections from Kafka’s writings, a list of his chief works in English translation, a chronology of Kafka’s life and times, and recommended reading for those who wish to delve deeper.

Immanuel Kant taught and wrote prolifically about physical geography yet never traveled further than forty miles from his home in Konigsberg. How appropriate it is then that in his philosophy he should deny that all knowledge was derived from experience. Kant’s aim was to restore metaphysics. He insisted that all experience must conform to knowledge. According to Kant, space and time are subjective; along with various “categories,” they help us to see the phenomena of the world–though never its true reality.

In Kant in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Kant’s life and ideas and explains their influence on man’s struggle to understand his existence in the world. The book also includes selections from Kant’s work, a brief list of suggested readings for those who wish to delve deeper, and chronologies that place Kant within his own age and in the broader scheme of philosophy.

Kierkegaard wasn’t really a philosopher in the academic sense, yet he produced what many people expect of philosophy. He didn’t write about the world, he wrote about life, about how we live, and how we choose to live. His subject was the individual and his or her existence, the “existing being.” In Kierkegaard’s view, this purely subjective entity lay beyond the reach of reason, logic, philosophical systems, theology, or even “the pretenses of psychology.” Nonetheless, it was the source of all these subjects. The branch of philosophy to which Kierkegaard gave birth has come to be known as existentialism, a much discussed and debated topic of philosophy.

In Kierkegaard in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Kierkegaard’s life and ideas and explains their influence on man’s struggle to understand his existence in the world.

The book also includes selections from Kierkegaard’s work, a brief list of suggested readings for those who wish to delve deeper, and chronologies that place Kierkegaard within his own age and in the broader scheme of philosophy.

Karl Marx’s devastating critique of capitalism, and his proposal of communism as the answer to the failings of the capitalist system, bore their greatest fruits in the twentieth century with the formation of the communist state in the Soviet Union. This great venture has now all but completely failed. Yet the force of the communist belief offered the prospect of “justice on this earth” to countless numbers. And Marx’s critique has influenced generations of thinkers who call themselves Marxists.

In Marx in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Marx’s life and ideas and explains their influence on man’s struggle to understand his existence in the world. The book also includes selections from Marx’s work, a brief list of suggested readings for those who wish to delve deeper, and chronologies that place Marx within his own age and in the broader scheme of philosophy.

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With Friedrich Nietzsche, philosophy was dangerous not only for philosophers but for everyone. Nietzsche ultimately went mad, but his ideas presaged a collective madness that had horrific consequences in Europe in the early 1900s. Though his philosophy is more one of aphorisms and insights than a system, it is brilliant, persuasive, and incisive. His major concept is the will to power, which he saw as the basic impulse for all our acts. Christianity he saw as a subtle perversion of this concept–thus Nietzsche’s famous pronouncement, “God is dead.”

In Nietzsche in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Nietzsche’s life and ideas and explains their influence on man’s struggle to understand his existence in the world. The book also includes selections from Nietzsche’s work, a brief list of suggested readings for those who wish to delve deeper, and chronologies that place Nietzsche within his own age and in the broader scheme of philosophy.

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. Adopting the nickname Plato, he embarked instead on a life in philosophy. In 387 BC he founded the Academy, the world’s first university, and taught his students that all we see is not reality but merely a reproduction of the true source. And in his famous Republic he described the politics of “the highest form of state.”

In Plato in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Plato’s life and ideas and explains their influence on man’s struggle to understand his existence in the world. The book also includes selections from Plato’s work, a brief list of suggested reading for those who wish to delve deeper, and chronologies that place Plato within his own age and in the broader scheme of philosophy.

The 90 Minutes series includes brief but authoritative interpretations of the world’s greatest thinkers, deciphering philosophical thought in an entertaining and accessible fashion and making it comprehensible and interesting to almost everyone.

In Rousseau we encounter a walking ego, a naked sensibility. Feeling triumphs over intellectual argument in his works, which are both deeply stirring and deeply inconsistent. Yet while his contemporaries Kant and Hume may have been superior academic philosophers, the sheer power of Rousseau’s ideas was unequaled in his time. It was he who encouraged the introduction of both liberty and irrationality into the public domain.

In Rousseau in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Rousseau’s life and ideas and explains their influence on man’s struggle to understand his existence in the world. The book also includes selections from Rousseau’s work, a brief list of suggested readings for those who wish to delve deeper, and chronologies that place Rousseau within his own age and in the broader scheme 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 when this set of ideas filled the spiritual gap left amidst the ruins of World War II. Existentialism was a philosophy of action and showed the ultimate freedom of the individual. In Sartre’s hands it became a revolt against European bourgeois values.

In Sartre in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Sartre’s life and ideas and explains their influence on man’s struggle to understand his existence in the world. The book also includes selections from Sartre’s work, a brief list of suggested readings for those who wish to delve deeper, and chronologies that place Sartre within his own age and in the broader scheme of philosophy.

Schopenhauer, the “philosopher of pessimism,” makes it very plain that he regards the world and our life in it as a bad joke. But if the world is indifferent to our fate, it doesn’t thwart us on purpose. The world’s fa+oade is supported by what Schopenhauer calls the universal Will–blind and without purpose. This Will brings on all our misery and suffering; our only hope is to liberate ourselves from its power and from the trappings of individualism and egoism that are at its mercy.

In Schopenhauer in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Schopenhauer’s life and ideas and explains their influence on man’s struggle to understand his existence in the world. The book also includes selections from Schopenhauer’s writings, a brief list of suggested readings for those who wish to delve deeper, and chronologies that place Schopenhauer within his own age and in the broader scheme of philosophy.

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Just a century after it had begun, philosophy entered its greatest age with the appearance of Socrates, who spent so much of his time talking about philosophy on the streets of Athens that he never got around to writing anything down. His method of aggressive questioning, called dialectic, was used to cut through the palaver of his adversaries and arrive at the truth. Socrates saw the world as not accessible to our senses, only to thought. Finally charged with impiety and the corruption of youth, he was tried and sentenced to death–and ended his life by drinking the judicial hemlock.

InSocrates in 90 minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Socrates’ life and ideas and explains their influence on man’s struggle to understand his existence in the world.

Spinoza’s brilliant metaphysical system was derived neither from reality nor experience. Starting from basic assumptions, with a series of geometric proofs he built a universe which was also God—one and the same thing, the classic example of pantheism. Although his system seems an oddity today, Spinoza’s conclusions are deeply in accord with modern thought, from science (the holistic ethics of today’s ecologists) to politics (the idea that the state exists to protect the individual). Both Spinoza’s system and conclusions have compelling beauty unequaled in the history of philosophy.

In Spinoza in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Spinoza’s life and ideas and explains their influence on man’s struggle to understand his existence in the world. The book also includes selections from Spinoza’s work, a brief list of suggested readings for those who wish to delve deeper, and chronologies that place Spinoza within his own age and in the broader scheme of philosophy.

Augustine’s spiritual crisis and conversion to Christianity, detailed in his Confessions, ultimately led him to his major contribution to philosophy: the fusion of the two doctrines of Christianity and Neoplatonism. This not only provided Christianity with a strong intellectual backing but tied it to the Greek tradition of philosophy, which helped keep the flame of philosophy burning, however dimly, through the Dark Ages. Augustine also produced important philosophic ideas of his own, including theories of time and subjective knowledge that anticipated by many centuries the work of Kant and Descartes.

In St. Augustine in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of St. Augustine’s life and ideas and explains their influence on man’s struggle to understand his existence in the world.

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Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Cesare Borgia-three iconic figures whose intersecting lives provide the basis for this astonishing work of narrative history. They could not have been more different, and they would meet only for a short time in 1502, but the events that transpired when they did would significantly alter each man’s perceptions-and the course of Western history.
In 1502, Italy was riven by conflict, with the city of Florence as the ultimate prize. Machiavelli, the consummate political manipulator, attempted to placate the savage Borgia by volunteering Leonardo to be Borgia’s chief military engineer. That autumn, the three men embarked together on a brief, perilous, and fateful journey through the mountains, remote villages, and hill towns of the Italian Romagna-the details of which were revealed in Machiavelli’s frequent dispatches and Leonardo’s meticulous notebooks.
Superbly written and thoroughly researched, The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior is a work of narrative genius-whose subject is the nature of genius itself.

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. Examples of infamy flourished alongside some of the finest art produced in western history.

This is but one of several paradoxes associated with the Borgia family. For the family which produced corrupt popes, depraved princes, and poisoners, would also produce a saint. These paradoxes which so characterize the Borgias have seldom been examined in great detail. Previously history has tended to condemn, or attempt in part to exonerate, this remarkable family. Yet in order to understand the Borgias, much more is needed than evidence for and against. The Borgias must be related to their time, together with the world which enabled them to flourish. Within this context the Renaissance itself takes on a very different aspect. Was the corruption part of the creation, or vice versa?

The primitive psychological forces which first played out in the amphitheaters of ancient Greece are all here. Along with the final, tragic downfall.

A sweeping and magisterial four-hundred-year history of both the city and the people who gave birth to the Renaissance.
Between the birth of Dante in 1265 and the death of Galileo in 1642, something happened that transformed the entire culture of western civilization. Painting, sculpture, and architecture would all visibly change in such a striking fashion that there could be no going back on what had taken place. Likewise, the thought and self-conception of humanity would take on a completely new aspect. Sciences would be born-or emerge in an entirely new guise.
The ideas that broke this mold began, and continued to flourish, in the city of Florence in northern central Italy. These ideas, which placed an increasing emphasis on the development of our common humanity-rather than other-worldly spirituality-coalesced in what came to be known as humanism. This philosophy and its new ideas would eventually spread across Italy, yet wherever they took hold they would retain an element essential to their origin. And as they spread further across Europe, this element would remain.

A dazzling history of the modest family that rose to become one of the most powerful in Europe, The Medici is a remarkably modern story of power, money, and ambition. 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 in Florence, as well as the Italian Renaissance which they did so much to sponsor and encourage. Interwoven into the narrative are the lives of many of the great Renaissance artists with whom the Medici had dealings, including Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Donatello, as well as scientists like Galileo and Pico della Mirandola.
In his enthralling study, Strathern also follows the fortunes of those members of the Medici family who achieved success away from Florence, including the two Medici popes and Catherine de’ Medici, who became queen of France and played a major role in that country through three turbulent reigns.

The Republic of Venice was the first great economic, cultural, and naval power of the modern Western world.
After winning the struggle for ascendency in the late 13th century, the Republic enjoyed centuries of unprecedented glory and built a trading empire which at its apogee reached as far afield as China, Syria, and West Africa. This golden period only drew to an end with the Republic’s eventual surrender to Napoleon.
The Venetians illuminates the character of the Republic during these illustrious years by shining a light on some of the most celebrated personalities of European history-Petrarch, Marco Polo, Galileo, Titian, Vivaldi, and Casanova. Frequently, though, these emblems of the city found themselves at odds with the Venetian authorities, who prized stability above all else, and were notoriously suspicious of any “cult of personality.” Was this very tension perhaps the engine for the Republic’s unprecedented rise?
Rich with biographies of some of the most exalted characters who have ever lived, The Venetians is a refreshing and authoritative new look at the history of the most evocative of city-states.

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. Among the most long-lasting and stable civilizations was that of medieval Europe. There stasis was achieved, and with it a stability that permitted the development of structured thought and intellectual embellishment of unparalleled degree. Like the vast Gothic cathedrals of western Europe, certainties of thought were part and parcel of the medieval age. Its monument of the intellect was the largely static, cumulative philosophy of Scholasticism. And the acknowledged maestro of Scholastic philosophy was Thomas Aquinas.

In Thomas Aquinas in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Aquinas’ life and ideas and explains their influence on man’s struggle to understand his existence in the world. The book also includes selections from Aquinas’ work, a brief list of suggested readings for those who wish to delve deeper, and chronologies that place Aquinas within his own age and in the broader scheme of philosophy.

A highly sensitive and intelligent child, Virginia Woolf grew up in a large family prone to psychological instability. Throughout her life, she was subject to periods of mental breakdown, yet when she was lucid she was capable of a uniquely perceptive and frank introspection. Under the influence of the Bloomsbury Group and their progressive social attitudes, she became experimental in her life and art, breaking with convention to produce some of the finest and most unique literary works of the twentieth century.

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. The book also includes a list of Woolf’s chief works, a chronology of her life and times, and recommended reading for those who wish to delve deeper.

If we accept Wittgenstein’s word for it, he is the last philosopher. In his view, philosophy in the traditional sense was finished.

Ludwig Wittgenstein was a superb logician who distrusted language and sought to solve the problems of philosophy by reducing them to logic. All else–metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, finally even philosophy itself–was excluded. “What we cannot speak about,” he declared, “we must pass over in silence.”

InWittgenstein in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Wittgenstein’s life and ideas and explains their influence on man’s struggle to understand his existence in the world. The book also includes selections from Wittgenstein’s work, a brief list of suggested readings for those who wish to delve deeper, and chronologies that place Wittgenstein within his own age and in the broader scheme of philosophy.