Over the course of his 60 years, Christopher Hitchens has been a citizen of both the United States and the United Kingdom. He has been both a socialist opposed to the war in Vietnam and a supporter of the U.S. war against Islamic extremism in Iraq. He has been both a foreign correspondent in some of the world's most dangerous places and a legendary bon vivant with an unquenchable thirst for alcohol and literature. He is a fervent atheist, raised as a Christian, by a mother whose Jewish heritage was not revealed to him until her suicide. In other words, Christopher Hitchens contains multitudes. He sees all sides of an argument. And he believes the personal is political. This is the story of his life, lived large.

Originally published in 1976, Clausewitz and the State presents a comprehensive analysis of one of the significant thinkers of modern Europe. Peter Paret combines social and military history and psychological interpretation with a study of Clausewitz's military theories and of his unduly neglected historical and political writing. This timely new edition includes a preface which allows Paret to recount the past thirty years of discussion on Clausewitz and respond to critics. A companion volume to Clausewitz's On War, this book is indispensable to anyone interested in Clausewitz and his theories, and their proper historical context.

Presents the major ideas that have formed the modern Latin American political mind and profiles influential revolutionaries, thinkers, poets, and novelists, from Che Guevara to Octavio Paz and Gabriel García Márquez

As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh reveals the inner life of Susan Sontag.Providing a unique insight into the mind of one of the leading intellectuals of the modern age, Susan Sontag's As Conscious is Harnessed to Flesh chronicles the cultural, moral, and political journeys of this renowned critic and artist at the height of her powers.As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh follows Sontag through the turbulent years of the late 1960s - from her trip to Hanoi at the peak of the Vietnam War to her time making films in Sweden - up to 1980, just before the beginning of the Reagan era. This is an invaluable record of the inner workings of one of the most inquisitive and analytical thinkers of the twentieth century at the height of her power. It is also a remarkable document of on individual's political and moral awakening.'More true to life, both intellectual and emotional, than the most artful novel or careful biography' Sunday Telegraph'Gold dust' Sunday Times'A powerful self-portrait emerges. In its fragmentation . . . and passion, its combination of the erudite and the everyday, it is more true to life, both intellectual and emotional, than the most artful novel or careful biography. It may well be that Sontag's diaries will come to be seen as just as brilliant and important as anything she wrote' Sunday Telegraph'Mesmerising, fascinating' Guardian'Express the fullness and diversity of her intellectual curiosity. Revelatory in the most profound sense: they are existential fragments, self-selected thoughts, emotions, reactions . . . arising in one of the most remarkable minds of the twentieth century' The TimesOne of America's best-known and most admired writers, Susan Sontag was also a leading commentator on contemporary culture until her death in December 2004. Her books include four novels and numerous works of non-fiction, among them Regarding the Pain of Others, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, At the Same Time, Against Interpretation and Other Essays and Reborn: Early Diaries 1947-1963, all of which are published by Penguin. A further eight books, including the collections of essays Under the Sign of Saturn and Where the Stress Falls, and the novels The Volcano Lover and The Benefactor, are available from Penguin Modern Classics.

Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer -- all are ex-friends of Norman Podhoretz, the renowned editor and critic and leading member of the group of New York intellectuals who came to be known as "the Family." As only a family member could, Podhoretz tells the story of these friendships, once central to his life, and shows how the political and cultural struggles of the past fifty years made them impossible to sustain. With wit, piercing insight, and startling honesty, we are introduced as never before to a type of person for whom ideas were often matters of life and death, and whose passing from the scene has left so large a gap in American culture. Podhoretz was the trailblazer of the now-famous journey of a number of his fellow intellectuals from radicalism to conservatism -- a journey through which they came to exercise both cultural and political influence far beyond their number. With this fascinating account of his once happy and finally troubled relations with these cultural icons, Podhoretz helps us understand why that journey was undertaken and just how consequential it became. In the process we get a brilliantly illuminating picture of the writers and intellectuals who have done so much to shape our world. Combining a personal memoir with literary, social, and political history, this unique gallery of stern and affectionate portraits is as entertaining as a novel and at the same time more instructive about postwar American culture than a formal scholarly study. Interwoven with these tales of some of the most quixotic and scintillating of contemporary American thinkers are themes that are introduced, developed, and redeveloped in a variety of contexts, with each appearance enriching the others, like a fugue in music. It is all here: the perversity of brilliance; the misuse of the mind; the benightedness of people usually considered especially enlightened; their human foibles and olympian detachment; the rigors to be endured and the prizes to be won and the prices to be paid for the reflective life. Most people live their lives in a very different way, and at one point, in a defiantly provocative defense of the indifference shown to the things by which intellectuals are obsessed, Norman Podhoretz says that Socrates' assertion that the unexamined life was not worth living was one of the biggest lies ever propagated by a philosopher. And yet, one comes away from Ex-Friends feeling wistful for a day when ideas really mattered and when there were people around who cared more deeply about them than about anything else. Reading of a time when the finest minds of a generation regularly gathered in New York living rooms to debate one another with an articulateness, a passion, and a level of erudition almost extinct, we come to realize how enviable it can be to live a life as poignantly and purposefully examined as Norman Podhoretz's is in Ex-Friends.

Aron reflects with simplicity and depth on industrial society, communism, the future of democracy, peace and war, the nuclear age, and also Charles de Gaulle, Jean-Paul Sartre, Andre Malraux, Henry Kissinger and others.

"A memoir exploring the author's father's love of wine" --

In 1906, Harriet Levy was talked into moving to Paris by her friend Alice B. Toklas and suddenly found herself immersed in a strange world peopled by artists who spoke a language she could not understand--a colorful world that she could only remotely observe in black and white. Paris Portraits is a short masterpiece. This sparkling manuscript, long hidden in the archives of the University of California's Bancroft Library, brings to life a vibrant and mythic time and place. Through Harriet's eyes, we circulate among the artists and patrons in the salons of Gertrude and Sarah Stein, overhear conversations between the up-and-coming Matisse and his students, and see Gertrude Stein's reaction when she learns of Picasso putting his hand on Toklas's knee. We're present when, while reading the poetry of Tagore, Harriet looks up and for the first time, sees--really sees and understands with the heart--what Matisse is doing.

Antiblack racism avows reason is white while emotion, and thus supposedly unreason, is black. Challenging academic adherence to this notion, Lewis R. Gordon offers a portrait of Martinican-turned-Algerian revolutionary psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon as an exemplar of "living thought" against forms of reason marked by colonialism and racism. Working from his own translations of the original French texts, Gordon critically engages everything in Fanon from dialectics, ethics, existentialism, and humanism to philosophical anthropology, phenomenology, and political theory as well as psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Gordon takes into account scholars from across the Global South to address controversies around Fanon's writings on gender and sexuality as well as political violence and the social underclass. In doing so, he confronts the replication of a colonial and racist geography of reason, allowing theorists from the Global South to emerge as interlocutors alongside northern ones in a move that exemplifies what, Gordon argues, Fanon represented in his plea to establish newer and healthier human relationships beyond colonial paradigms.

In these vivid portraits of prominent twentieth-century intellectuals, Edward Shils couples the sensitivity of a biographer with the profound knowledge of a highly respected scholar. Ranging as widely across various disciplines as Shils himself did, the essays gathered here share a distaste for faddists who "run with the intellectual mob" and a deep respect for intellectuals who maintain their integrity under great pressure. Highlights include an affectionate treatment of Leo Szilard, the physicist whose involvement with the development of the atomic bomb led him to work ceaselessly to address its social consequences; a discussion of the educational philosophy of Robert Maynard Hutchins, the University of Chicago's fifth and most controversial president; an appreciative account of the Polish emigre Leopold Labedz's well-informed and outspoken resistance to Communism; and an essay about the extraordinary Indian writer Nirad Chaudhuri.

In this eloquent and thought-provoking "autohistory," John Lukacs, distinguished historian and writer, describes the history of his own convictions and beliefs. The journey takes us from the Hungary of the 1930s and the ravaged Budapest of World War II to Lukacs’s discovery of the New World, his forays into the intellectual life of New York City, and finally his settling in Philadelphia. Along the way, Lukacs examines many of the major currents of our period, including fascism, communism, democracy, anti-Semitism, and the Christian realism from which springs the book’s title. What emerges is a mind that brings to bear on the conflicts of the twentieth century the erudition of the European heritage and the independence of the American. In prose as elegant as it is supple, Confessions of an Original Sinner is at once the vivid account of one man’s voyage and an important contribution to that small library that brings into sharp focus the major intellectual developments of our time.

"Once upon a time there were three men who exemplified, without knowing it, my ideal in life. All of them became famous as writers, influential thinkers, and public figures. Their names are Clifton Fadiman, Lionel Trilling, and Jacques Barzun. They met in college, they remained aware of one another as friends or, if less than friends, companions and fellow crusaders on behalf of similar ideals. Although one of them never knew of my existence, the second ignored it, and the third treated me with formal kindness, without them I would have had no concrete model in my youth of what I wanted to become. Theirs was the universe in which I wished to have my being." With these words, Carolyn Heilbrun begins a personal, pointed, and surprisingly moving account of how a woman, destined to become one of the leading feminist critics of her day as well as one of our most popular mystery novelists, found the models for the life she aspired to in men who neither imagined nor countenanced women as their equals or colleagues. Remembering these three figures as they were when she hung upon their printed words and professorial presences, reappraising them now half a century later, Heilbrun vividly evokes what these remarkable individuals had to offer to an admiring young woman who could not acknowledge—and later would not accept—the impossibility of following in their paths. In the admired anthologies, magazine articles, and introductions through which Fadiman transmitted the world of high culture to an educated general public, he indicated no devotion to questions of female destiny; yet long before Heilbrun could imagine the life in the academy that was denied to Fadiman but would eventually be hers, his was the career to which she privately aspired. Later, in her days as a graduate student at Columbia, it was Trilling who would have the most powerful intellectual effect upon her, formulating as he did the tensions inherent in the desire to salvage what was of worth from a sad, almost moribund culture, even if he frankly admitted to no interest in teaching women or in considering their destinies beyond the domestic sphere. Only the courtly Barzun, also a mentor at Columbia, seemed capable of respecting female accomplishment and eschewing stereotyped views of women. Yet together, all three men unconsciously made Heilbrun's life as a feminist possible, by representing both what she wished to join and what she needed to struggle against. When Men Were the Only Models We Had is a loving, admiring, but stringent account of youthful enthusiasms, of the romance of ideas, of the intellectual brilliance of three unwitting mentors, and of the hopelessness of female ambition in the years before the feminist movement of the last three decades of the last century. And it is, in the end, a book that offers splendid proof that the models we once had are no longer the only ones before us.

"The tragedy of the left is that, having achieved an unprecedented victory in helping stop an appalling war, it then proceeded to commit suicide." So writes Todd Gitlin about the aftermath of the Vietnam War in this collection of writings that calls upon intellectuals on the left to once again engage American public life and resist the trappings of knee-jerk negativism, intellectual fads, and political orthodoxy. Gitlin argues for a renewed sense of patriotism based on the ideals of sacrifice, tough-minded criticism, and a willingness to look anew at the global role of the United States in the aftermath of 9/11. Merely criticizing and resisting the Bush administration will not do-the left must also imagine and propose an America reformed.Where then can the left turn? Gitlin celebrates the work of three prominent postwar intellectuals: David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, and Irving Howe. Their ambitious, assertive, and clearly written works serve as models for an intellectual engagement that forcefully addresses social issues and remains affirmative and comprehensive. Sharing many of the qualities of these thinkers' works, Todd Gitlin's blunt, frank analysis of the current state of the left and his willingness to challenge orthodoxies pave the way for a revival in leftist thought and a new liberal patriotism.

Robert Manne is one of Australia's most profound political analysts. His memoir traces his intellectual roots, revealing how his family background and early years informed the questions he would spend his life trying to answer. It also provides a fascinating portrait of key political controversies, including intellectual combat over Pol Pot, Wilfred Burchett, Quadrant, the Stolen Generations, Manning Clark, the Howard government, the Murdoch press and much more. During the Cold War and the culture wars, Manne clashed with some of the most influential thinkers, writers and polemicists - Noam Chomsky, Les Murray, Leonie Kramer, Tom Keneally, Isi Leibler, Helen "Demidenko" Darville, Peter Craven, Paddy McGuinness, Keith Windschuttle and Andrew Bolt. This memoir recounts with surprising and unknown detail what really happened and why. Often subverting conventional notions of left and right, Manne is an original thinker who has helped shape the nation's discourse for decades. This is the inside story of a life of engagement and reflection, and a book for anyone interested in the shape and meaning of the past nearly fifty years of politics. 'Robert Manne's prose is elegant and reflective, offering the rare perspective of a man unafraid to admit and learn from his mistakes.' -Becca Whitehead, Books+Publishing 'Essential reading for anyone interested in what has happened to politics and ideas in this country since World War II' -Frank Bongiorno, Australian Book Review

Berend's memoir offers an interesting case study, a subjective addition to the "objective" historical works on Central and Eastern European state socialism. It describes the hard choices of intellectuals in a dictatorial state: 1. remain in isolation, concentrate on scholarly works, and exclude politics in your personal life; 2. be in opposition, criticize and unveil the regime, accept discrimination and exclusion; 3. remain within the establishment and work for reforming the country using legal possibilities to criticize the regime and to achieve changes from within. Ivan T. Berend, is Distinguished Professor at the University of California Los Angeles, Director of the European Studies Program. He was one of the masterminds of regime change in Hungary. He made a career in Hungary as a university professor, Rector of the University of Economics (1973-79), and President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1985-90). He was President of the International Committee of Historical Sciences (1995-2000), and Vice-President of the International Economic History Association (1986-1994). His research interests are the complex economic, social, ideological, and cultural history of Central and Eastern Europe in the 19th-20th century; economic modernization; problems of European backwardness; transition from state socialism to capitalism. He published 26 books and more than 120 studies.--Publisher's description

This volume completes the biography of Peter Struve (1870-1944), one of the most remarkable and influential Russian intellectuals of this century. More than anyone else in his time, Struve was the master of history, journalism, economics, international relations, and practical politics. A scholar and activist, he helped found the Marxist movement in Russia, initiated Marxist Revisionism there, and launched Lenin's career, and he was the theoretician and a cofounder of the Constitutional Democratic Party. After 1905--the years covered in this self-contained volume--Struve became the principal critic of the Russian intelligentsia and the main political ideologist of the anti-Bolshevik opposition during the Civil War and in emigration. His life was a part of the life of Russia as he struggled to craft a liberal democracy and wound up defeated and faced with an emerging totalitarian state. In writing about Struve, Richard Pipes turns biography into history. He lays bare the split soul of the Russian intellectuals--their irresponsibility, unwillingness to compromise, intolerance. Struve, the liberal turned conservative, preached to his countrymen physical and spiritual freedom based on law. He was a Westerner in his championing of social reform, legality, private property, and a vigorous state and foreign policy. This long and rich tradition of liberal-conservatism is recounted against the background of a "monstrous growth of political claims on the individual that caused intellectual and moral independence increasingly to be punished with ostracism, confinement, exile, and death."