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Jean-Paul Sartre was arguably the most celebrated and written-about intellectual of the twentieth century. This title offers general readers and specialised students alike a way of understanding the seeming enigmas and contradictions in Sartre's very public, and occasionally hazardous commitments.

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With a career in literature and art spanning more than sixty years, John Berger is characterized by an independent and anti-institutional approach to creativity. Working in a range of media including novels, painting, essays and scriptwriting, Berger's is perhaps best known for his seminal book of art criticism Ways of Seeing G.

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In John Cage, Rob Haskins outlines how the controversial artist contributed to twentieth-century music, literature and art. Haskins considers John Cage's life, art, ideas and work, evaluating the twin pillars of Cage's creative output and the ideas that lie behind it.

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In this book Andrew Ballantyne offers a new critical biography of prominent nineteenth-century art and architecture critic John Ruskin. Ballantyne shows how Ruskins ideas gave clear moral character to art, architecture and the Picturesque and reveals why and how his reputation endures today.

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A new critical biography of Joseph Beuys, arguably the most important and controversial German artist of the late twentieth century.

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An original interpretation of Joseph Conrad's life of writing.

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A new biography of Langston Hughes, taking in his extraordinary life and canonical works.

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Ludwig Wittgenstein, writes noted scholar Edward Kanterian, was a 'philosopher's philosopher'. He was one of the founders of modern analytic philosophy and is regarded as the greatest philosophical genius since Immanuel Kant. In this book, Kanterian traces the complex relationship between the philosopher's life, his work and his time.

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Adam Watt's biography considers Proust's early years of personal and aesthetic experiment, the growth of his masterwork A la recherche du temps perdu and his personal decline due to ill-health.

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Moving between the major works and Foucault's life (and especially his political life), Macey demonstrates a vital aspect of Foucault's writings their concern with issues that apply to everyone and that have an immediate effect on our lives.

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This is an absorbing account of the life and work of one of Russia's most inventive and exuberant novelists and playwrights.

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A concise and lively study of the enormously productive and varied life and art of one of the twentieth century's most influential artistic figures. Mary Ann Caws describes the artist's life thematically and chronologically, and also takes as focal points Picasso's relationships with his close friends as they changed over the years.

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A new biography of the extravagant, colourful French novelist and travel writer Pierre Loti, describing his lifetime of adventuring, his often very public private life, and his friendships with celebrities of the day such as Princess Alice of Monaco, Henry James and Willa Cather.

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Drawing extensively on Tchaikovsky's uncensored letters and diaries, this biography explores the composer's life in the artistic culture of nineteenth-century Russian society, revealing how he became a figure of international renown.

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A timely reappraisal of Indian writer, composer, musician, artist and activist Rabindranath Tagore.

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Published at the bicentennial of his birth, Raymond Furness's Richard Wagner provides a clear and balanced view of both Wagner's great successes and the controversies generated by his life and art.

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Roland Barthes (19151980) is one of France's most important writers andtheorists of the second half of the twentieth century. His work is hugely influentialin the fields of semiotics, structuralism and numerous areas of the humanities.

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Waiting for Godot . An original and provocative historical interpretation of Beckett and his art, Samuel Beckett is not just a 'life and times', but also an 'anti-life' of a figure who, like many of the very greatest writers, was profoundly repelled by his age.

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'One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman', wrote Simone de Beauvoir in her controversial best-seller The Second Sex

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This book is an engaging presentation of the life and work of the legendary French philosopher, political activist and mystic Simone Weil. Palle Yourgrau assesses Weil's controversial critique of Judaism, and her radical re-imagination of Christianity; and analyses how Weil's personal struggles influenced her mature philosophy.

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Soren Kierkegaard is a story of a man destined to become a thorn in the side of society.

This is a book about the life and work of a singular writer, known for his biographies and travel writing but most famous for his novels The Red and the Black and the Charterhouse of Parma .

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At the age of fifty Stphane Mallarm (1842-98) spoke of his published work as 'very precise reference points on my mind's journey'. In Stphane Mallarm, Roger Pearson charts that journey for the first time, blending a biographical account of the poet's life with a detailed analysis of his evolving poetic theory and practice.

A concise yet thorough critical biography, which throws new light on the work of German novelist, short-story writer, essayist, social critic and philanthropist Thomas Mann.