In the autumn of 1924, just before Andre Breton published the "Manifeste du surrealisme", two young men met in Paris for the first time. Georges Bataille, 27, starting work at the Bibliotheque Nationale; Michel Leiris, 23, beginning his studies in et...

Despite Western culture's roots and much touted pride in its classical Greek and Roman legacy, the sexual freedoms of the ancient world have had no place in the official cultures of Western societies. As late as the 19th Century, homosexuality was th...

From the late eighteenth century, Calcutta, first city of the British empire, has been a hub of intersecting ideas and movements of change. Nowhere did the restless currents of history play themselves out more graphically than in the composite art of...

Controversial, challenging and outspoken, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is best known as a deconstructionist and post-colonial theorist. With an awe-inspiring track record in several areas, ranging from Feminism and Marxism to Literary Criticism and of...

Jean-Paul Sartre, novelist, playwright, biographer, was undoubtedly one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century. Above all, however, he was an embodiment of the engage intellectual, active in a variety of political causes, as well as an indi...