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Archives: Book Authors
Hobbes Thomas
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was an English philosopher. He is best remembered for ‘Leviathan’, a hugely influential book that has caused him to be considered one of the founders of modern political philosophy.
Locke John
John Locke (1632-1704) was considered the father of Classical Liberalism. His ‘An Essay Concerning Human Understanding’ was a milestone in the developing comprehension of the human mind.
Voltaire
Francois-Marie Arouet (1694-1778) was better known under his nom de plume of Voltaire. A prolific writer of over 2,000 books and booklets and over 20,000 letters, he is best remembered for novels such as ‘Candide’.
Potter Beatrix
Beatrix Potter (1866 – 1943) was largely ignored by her parents as she was growing up, and began writing and sketching as a means of occupying her time. She would come to create some of the most enduringly popular children’s stories ever written.
Hall Radclyffe
Born Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall in 1880, Hall wrote eight novels, the most famous being ‘The Well of Loneliness’. With its overtly lesbian theme, the book was published in 1928, but was deemed obscene and was withdrawn from circulation, not appearing again until 1949.
MacDonald George
George MacDonald (1824-1905) was a Scottish author and poet. He wrote on many subjects, including Christianity as he was a minister of the church. However, it is his children’s fantasy and fairy stories for which he is remembered. J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, W.H. Auden and Edith Nesbit, to name but a few, were some of his fellow authors influenced by his work. ‘The Princess and the Goblin’ is his most enduring work.
Smith Adam
Adam Smith (1723-1790) was a Scottish historian, political economist, writer, rhetorician, astronomer, and social philosopher, who wrote ‘The Wealth of Nations’. It is considered the first book of modern political economy, and still provides the foundation for the study of that discipline.
Tressell Robert
On 3 February 1911, a 40 year-old signwriter and decorator called Robert Noonan died of tuberculosis in the Royal Infirmary in Liverpool. Without family or friends in the city, he received a pauper’s burial. Three hundred miles away, in a deed-box in Hastings, lay the handwritten manuscript of his unpublished novel, ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’. The story of how this book became a major influence on socialist thinking is rather more remarkable than his life.
Yeats W.B.
W(illiam) B(utler) Yeats (1865-1939) was an Irish poet, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. He is widely regarded as the best poet to write in English during the twentieth century, and was the driving force behind the Irish literary revival.