Top 10 Books about great thinkers (Guardian)

This is one of the 759 lists we use to generate our main The Greatest Books list.

About this list

Guardian, 10 Books

"The very best intellectual biographies enrich our understanding of great thinkers by situating them in a time and a place, and by exploring how they negotiate the difficult art of living through the products of their minds. Here are 10 wonderful books that thread together the lives and ideas of their thinkers in a way that intensifies our understanding of each."

By Peter Salmon, author of An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida. He has received the Writer's Awards from the Arts Council of England and teaches creative writing.

This list was originally published in 2020 and was added to this site over 1 year ago.

View: List Grid Table
Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
15901 St. Augustine Rebecca West 1933 British English
17122 Ludwig Wittgenstein Ray Monk 1990 British English
17122 At Home With André And Simone Weil Sylvie Weil 2009 Unknown French
17122 Kant Manfred Kuehn 2001 Unknown English
17122 Simone De Beauvoir Toril Moi 2008 Unknown English
17122 Frantz Fanon David Macey 2001 Unknown English
17122 Georges Perec David Bellos 1993 Unknown English
6260 At The Existentialist Café Sarah Bakewell 2016 British English
17122 Angela Davis Angela Davis 1974 American English
8765 War Diaries Jean Paul Sartre 1940 French French