Fontana modern masters

A sympathetic and systematic reconstruction of Sartre's philosophy, explaining its relation to other major philosophical theories. Among the themes elucidated are the relation between reality and our representation of it; the parities between language and consciousness; the relationship between the world as it may be and as we structure it in our interventions as engaged beings; the conceptual interdependence of the self and others; and the connections between factual beliefs and systems of value.--Adapted from book jacket.

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) was the dominant force in twentieth-century British and American poetry. With poems such as "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," he introduced an edgy, disenchanted, utterly contemporary version of French Symbolism to the English-speaking world. With his masterpiece "The Waste Land," he almost single-handedly ushered an entire poetic culture into the modern world. And with his enormously influential essays he set the canonical standards to which writers and critics of poetry have adhered throughout our era.

Isaiah Berlin was witness to a century. Born in the twilight of the Czarist empire, he lived long enough to see the Soviet state collapse. The son of a Riga timber merchant and the first Jew elected to a fellowship at All Souls, Oxford, he was a presiding judge of intellectual life on both sides of the Atlantic for sixty years: historian of the Russian intelligentsia, biographer of Marx, scholar of the Romantic movement, and defender of the liberal idea of freedom against Soviet tyranny. When he died in 1997, he was hailed as the most important liberal philosopher of his time. But Berlin's life was not only a life of the mind. Present at the crucial events of our age, he was in Washington during World War II, in Moscow at the dawn of the Cold War, in Israel as the new state came into being. For this definitive biography - the result of a remarkable ten-year collaboration between biographer and subject - Michael Ignatieff, himself a leading public intellectual, interviewed Berlin extensively and was granted complete access to his papers, one of the largest archives in Anglo-American cultural history. Ignatieff charts the emergence of a unique liberal temperament - serene, comic, secular, and unafraid - and he examines its influence on Berlin's vision of liberalism, which stressed the often tragic nature of political and moral choice.

Roland Barthes (1915-80) was a central contributor to the thought of his time, but he was also something of an outsider. His father died in the First World War, he enjoyed his mother's unfailing love, he spent long years in the sanatorium, and he was aware of his homosexuality from an early age: all this quickly gave him a sense of his own difference. He experienced the great events of contemporary history from a distance. Nevertheless, Barthes's life was caught up in the violent intense sweep of the twentieth century, a century that he helped to make intelligible. This major new biography, based on unpublished material never before explored (archives, journals and notebooks), sheds new light on Barthes's intellectual positions, his political commitments and his ideas, beliefs and desires. It details the many themes he discussed, the authors he defended, the myths he analysed, the polemics that made him famous and his acute ear for the languages of his day. It also underscores his remarkable ability to see which way the wind was blowing. He is still a compelling author to read, as his path-breaking explorations uncovered themes that continue to preoccupy us today. Barthes's life story gives substance and cohesion to his career, which was guided by desire, intelligence and an extreme sensitivity to the material from which the world is shaped--as well as a powerful refusal to accept any authoritarian discourse. His creative and imaginative use of ideas turned thinking into both an art and an adventure. This remarkable biography enables the reader to enter into Barthes's life and grasp the shape of his existence, and thus understand the kind of writer he became and how he turned literature into life itself. -- Publisher's description.