Written in 1939 and unpublished until 2000, Sebastian Haffner's memoir of the rise of Nazism in Germany offers a unique portrait of the lives of ordinary German citizens between the wars. Covering 1907 to 1933, his eyewitness account provides a portrait o
Winston Churchill (1874-1965, KG 1953) Conservative politician, Prime Minister 1940-5 and 1951-5. Perhaps the most determined and inspirational war leader in Britain's history, it was during that darkest summer of 1940 that Churchill's astonishing oratory
The narrator of Ivan Klima's novel has temporarily abandoned his work-in-progress -an essay on Kafka -and exchanged his writer's pen for the orange vest of a Prague road-sweeper. As he works, he meditates on Czechoslovakia, on Kafka, on life, on art and,
This richly detailed biography of a key figure in nineteenth-century philosophy pays equal attention to the life and to the work of Arthur Schopenhauer. Rudiger Safranski places this visionary skeptic in the context of his philosophical predecessors and c
One of the century's greatest philosophers, without whom there would be no Sartre, no Foucault, no Frankfurt School, Martin Heidegger was also a man of great failures and flaws, a Faustus who made a pact with the devil of his time, Adolf Hitler. The story
Albert Speer was an unemployed architect when Hitler came to power in 1933. Soon he was designing the Third Reich's most important buildings. In 1942 Hitler appointed him Armaments Minister and he quadrupled production, an astonishing achievement that kep
"(Folsing) provides a nuanced, nonjudgmental personal portrait resting firmly on prodigious archival work. Albert Einstein allows us to see deeply into (his) inner world". -- Alan Lightman, The New York Review of BooksThe name of Albert Einstein has becom
