A fresh account of the life of Martin Luther. The sixteenth-century German friar whose public conflict with the medieval Roman Church triggered the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther was neither an unblemished saint nor a single-minded religious...

In this richly illustrated portrait, a prize-winning biographer surveys the entire sweep of William Blake's creative work while telling the story of his life William Blake, overlooked in his time, remains an enigmatic figure to contemporary readers d...

Personal letters reveal the quandary of a prominent German physicist during the Nazi years and the strength he shared with his loving wife Nobel Prize-winning physicist Werner Heisenberg lived far from his wife, Elisabeth, during most of the Second W...

More than just a single-minded warrior-king, Henry V comes to life in this fresh account as a gifted ruler acutely conscious of spiritual matters and his subjects' welfare Shakespeare's centuries-old portrayal of Henry V established the king's reputa...

This passionate and monumental biography reassesses the life and legacy of one of the most significant cultural figures of the twentieth century Unevenly respected, easily hated, almost always suspected of being inferior to his reputation, Jean Cocte...

This is the first modern scholarly biography of Blanche of Castile, whose identity has until now been subsumed in that of her son, the saintly Louis IX. A central figure in the politics of medieval Europe, Blanche was a sophisticated patron of religi...

As a young White House correspondent and Washington reporter during the Kennedy and Johnson years, Godfrey Hodgson covered two presidents who could hardly have been more different. John Kennedy's wit and dashing style, his war-hero status, and his Iv...

Jane Dawson has written the definitive life of John Knox, a leader of the Protestant Reformation in sixteenth-century Scotland. Based in large part on previously unavailable sources, including the recently discovered papers of Knox's close friend and...

Mark Rothko was not only one of the most influential American painters of the twentieth century; he was a scholar, an educator, and a deeply spiritual human being. Born Marcus Yakovlevich Rotkovitch, he emigrated from the Russian Empire to the United...

Franz Kafka was the poet of his own disorder. Throughout his life he struggled with a pervasive sense of shame and guilt that left traces in his daily existence – in his many letters, extensive diaries, and especially in his fiction. This stimulating...