Tacitus
Roman historian and senator; author of Annals and Histories; chronicled the Roman Empire with penetrating psychological insight.
Herodotus
Ancient Greek historian; the "Father of History"; author of The Histories.
Homer
Legendary ancient Greek poet; traditionally credited with the Iliad and the Odyssey.
François Rabelais
French Renaissance writer and physician; author of Gargantua and Pantagruel; master of satire and humanist comedy.
Balthasar Gracian
Spanish Jesuit priest and baroque prose writer; author of The Art of Worldly Wisdom and The Critick; master of aphoristic style.
Blaise Pascal
French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher; author of Pensées; pioneer in probability and theology.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Genevan philosopher and writer; author of Emile and The Social Contract; influenced Enlightenment and Romanticism.
Giacomo Casanova
Venetian adventurer and writer; author of Histoire de ma vie, chronicling 18th-century society.
Milan Kundera
Czech-born novelist and essayist; explored memory, irony, and political history; author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
German poet, novelist, and philosopher; author of Faust and The Sorrows of Young Werther; central figure in German literature.
William Shakespeare
English playwright and poet; widely regarded as the greatest writer in English; author of Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and more.
Thomas Dekker
English dramatist and pamphleteer; wrote plays and vivid accounts of London life, including plague pamphlets.
Mary Wollstonecraft
English writer and philosopher; author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; pioneering feminist and advocate of women's education.
Abbé Barruel
French Jesuit priest and writer; author of conspiracy theory works about Freemasonry and the French Revolution; influential in counter-revolutionary t...
Elias Canetti
Bulgarian-born writer and Nobel laureate; author of Auto-da-Fé and Crowds and Power; explored mass psychology and totalitarianism.
Hesiod
Ancient Greek poet; author of Works and Days and Theogony.
Lucretius
Roman poet and philosopher; author of De rerum natura, expounding Epicurean philosophy.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Greek novelist and philosopher; author of Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ; explored Greek identity and spirituality.
Philip Mansel
British historian; biographer and historian of courts and cities of the Middle East and Europe.
René Girard
French-American literary critic, anthropologist, and philosopher; developed mimetic theory of desire, violence, and the sacred.
Anthony Kaldellis
Historian of Byzantium; author on Byzantine identity, culture, and politics; translator and commentator.
Anna Komnene
Byzantine princess and historian; author of the Alexiad.
Aristotle
Ancient Greek philosopher; student of Plato, tutor of Alexander the Great; foundational works in logic, biology, ethics, politics, and metaphysics.
Roger Scruton
Sir Roger Vernon Scruton was an English philosopher and writer who specialised in aesthetics and political philosophy, particularly in the furtherance...
François de La Rochefoucauld
French nobleman and author; wrote Maxims, a collection of penetrating aphorisms on human nature and self-interest.
Jean de La Bruyère
French philosopher and moralist; author of Les Caractères, portraits of types and satirical observations of society.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Spanish novelist and playwright; author of Don Quixote, widely regarded as one of the greatest works of fiction ever written.
Laurence Sterne
Irish-born English novelist and Anglican clergyman; author of Tristram Shandy, an experimental and humorous novel.
Martial
Roman poet famous for his Epigrams, satirizing Roman society.
Showing 31-60 of 260 authors