“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 biographical essays, 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.

This unflinching collection of biographical essays exposes the startling contradictions between their public pronouncements and private lives:

• A History of Ideas: From Rousseau and Shelley to Sartre and Chomsky, discover the thinkers who forged the modern mind—and the often-shocking personal behavior they sought to conceal.
• Unflinching Cultural Criticism: Johnson pulls no punches, examining the egotism, cruelty, and dishonesty that flourished behind the celebrated public facades of figures like Marx, Tolstoy, and Hemingway.
• The Private Lives of Public Figures: Explore the gap between enlightened ideals and personal reality, from Rousseau’s abandonment of his children to the serial betrayals that marked the lives of so many others.
• A Provocative Reassessment: This classic polemic challenges readers to question the moral authority of intellectuals and reconsider the ideas we have inherited from these brilliant but deeply contradictory men.