Author: Zaretsky Robert Zaretsky

A dual biography crafted around the famous encounter between the French philosopher who wrote about power and the Russian empress who wielded it with great aplomb.In October 1773, after a grueling …

Throughout his life, James Boswell struggled to fashion a clear account of himself, but try as he might, he could not reconcile the truths of his era with those of his religious upbringing. Boswell’s …

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Albert Camus declared that a writer’s duty is twofold: "the refusal to lie about what one knows and the resistance against oppression." These twin …

The rise and spectacular fall of the friendship between the two great philosophers of the eighteenth century, barely six months after they first met, reverberated on both sides of the Channel. As the …

Known as the "patron saint of all outsiders, " Simone Weil (1909-43) was one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable thinkers, a philosopher who truly lived by her political and ethical …

A timely and nuanced book that sets the author’s experience as a nursing home volunteer during the pandemic alongside the wisdom of great thinkers who confronted their own plagues.In any time of …