"Johnson revels in all the wicked things these great thinkers have done...great fun to read." — New York Times Book Review
A fascinating portrait of the minds that have shaped the modern world. In an intriguing series of case studies, Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Brecht, Sartre, Edmund Wilson, Victor Gollancz, Lillian Hellman, Cyril Connolly, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Kenneth Tynan, and Noam Chomsky, among others, are revealed as intellectuals both brilliant and contradictory, magnetic and dangerous.
"Johnson revels in all the wicked things these great thinkers have done...great fun to read." — New York Times Book Review
“Here’s a book that should have a cleansing influence on Western literature and culture for years to come.” — Malcolm Forbes, Forbes
“So full of life and energy and fascinating detail, and so right for the moment, that anyone who picks it up will have a hard time putting it down.” — Norman Podhoretz, New York Post
