Leaving so few traces of himself behind, Thomas Aquinas seems to defy the efforts of the biographer. Highly visible as a public teacher, preacher, and theologian, he nevertheless has remained nearly invisible as man and saint. What can be discovered...

Elijah ben Solomon, the "Genius of Vilna", was perhaps the best-known and most understudied figure in modern Jewish history. In this book Eliyahu Stern offers a new narrative of Jewish modernity based on Elijah's life and influence. While the experie...

Born into slavery in 1818, Frederick Douglass escaped to freedom and became a passionate advocate for abolition and social change and the foremost spokesperson for the nation's enslaved African American population in the years preceding the Civil War...

During the Gilded Age, which saw the dawn of America's enduring culture wars, Robert Green Ingersoll was known as "the Great Agnostic". The nation's most famous orator, he raised his voice on behalf of Enlightenment reason, secularism, and the separa...

Glamorous, talented, audacious – Lillian Hellman knew everyone, did everything, had been everywhere. By the age of twenty-nine she had written "The Children's Hour", the first of four hit Broadway plays, and soon she was considered a member of Americ...

As the wife of King George II, Caroline of Ansbach became queen of England in 1727. Known for her intelligence and strong character, Queen Caroline wielded considerable political power until her death in 1737. She was enthusiastic and energetic in he...

Charles Dickens was regarded as a pillar of respectability in Victorian Britain, but in 1858 this image was nearly shattered. With the break-up of his marriage that year, rumours about a scandalous relationship he may have conducted with young actres...

At the centre of "The Hooligan's Return" is the author himself, always an outcast, on a bleak lifelong journey through Nazism and communism to exile in America. But while Norman Manea's book is in many ways a memoir, it is also a deeply imaginative w...

Born in 1885, King Faisal I of Iraq was a great figure not only in the founding of the state of Iraq but also in the making of the modern Middle East. In all the tumult leading to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of new Ara...

In 1943, twenty-four-year-old Primo Levi had just begun a career in chemistry when, after joining a partisan group, he was captured by the Italian Fascist Militia and deported to Auschwitz. Of the 650 Italian Jews in his transport, he was one of only...