Historian Sir John Wheeler-Bennett (1902-1975) was one of the twentieth century's most extraordinary political observers. Through an ability to make important connections, he became an authority on Germany in the interwar years and was acquainted wit...

Young Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in the United States for the first time in May 1831, commissioned by the French government to study the American prison system. For the next nine months he and his companion, Gustave de Beaumont, travelled and obse...

The seventeenth-century poet Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) is one of the most intriguing figures in English literature. A noted civil servant under Cromwell's Protectorate, he has been variously identified as a patriot, spy, conspirator, concealed homos...

As the New York Yankees' star centre fielder from 1936 to 1951, Joe DiMaggio is enshrined in America's memory as the epitome in sports of grace, dignity, and that ineffable quality called "class". But his career after retirement, starting with his ni...

The work of Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996), one of Russia's great modern poets, has been the subject of much study and debate. His life, too, is the stuff of legend, from his survival of the siege of Leningrad in early childhood to his expulsion from the...

This deeply informed biography of Walther Rathenau (1867-1922) tells of a man who – both thoroughly German and unabashedly Jewish – rose to leadership in the German War-Ministry Department during the First World War, and later to the exalted position...

A grand and fascinating figure in Victorian politics, the charismatic Lord Palmerston (1784-1865) presided over a period of great political and social change. He served as foreign secretary for fifteen years and prime minister for nine, engaged in st...

Between the late 1920s and the early 1950s, one of the most persuasive personality cults of all times saturated Soviet public space with images of Stalin. A torrent of portraits, posters, statues, films, plays, songs, and poems galvanized the Soviet...

Joe Louis defended his heavyweight boxing title an astonishing twenty-five times and reigned as world champion for more than eleven years. He got more column inches of newspaper coverage in the 1930s than FDR did. His racially and politically charged...

Though Bill Clinton has been out of office since 2001, public fascination with him continues unabated. Many books about Clinton have been published in recent years, but shockingly, no single-volume biography covers the full scope of Clinton's life fr...