John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor who is best known as the author of the classic high-fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. He served as the Rawl...

Generalísimo Francisco Franco, was head of state of Spain from 1939 until his death in 1975. Known as "El Caudillo de España" ("the leader"), he presided over the fascist authoritarian government of the Spanish State following victory in th...

Haile Selassie (Power of Trinity) was the last Emperor (1930–1936; 1941–1974) of Ethiopia, and is a religious symbol in the Rastafarian movement. He was born in the town-village of Ejersa Goro, Ethiopia, as Tafari Makonnen His father was Ra...

Jean Paul Getty was an American industrialist. He founded the Getty Oil Company, and in 1957 Fortune magazine named him the richest living American, whilst the 1966 Guinness Book of Records named him as the world's richest private citizen,...

Josip Broz Tito was a Yugoslav revolutionary and statesman, serving in various roles from 1943 until his death in 1980. During World War II he was the leader of the Partisans, often regarded as the most effective resistance movement in occu...

Otto James Messmer was an American animator, best known for his work on the Felix the Cat cartoons and comic strip produced by the Pat Sullivan studio. The extent of Messmer's role in the creation and popularity of Felix is a matter of o...

The Scream has come more and more to be accepted as Edvard Munch's most significant motif - the very symbol of modern man, for whom God is dead and for whom materialism provides no solace. Munch wrote several versions of a prose-lyrical ass...

Hermann Wilhelm Göring (also Goering in English) was a German politician and military leader, a leading member of the Nazi Party, second in command of the Third Reich, and commander of the Luftwaffe. He was tried for war crimes and crimes a...

Mao Zedong or Mao Tse-tung, also known as Chairman Mao, was a Chinese communist revolutionary, poet, political theorist and founding father of the People's Republic of China, which he governed as the Chairman of the Communist Party of China...

Joan Miró i Ferrà was a Catalan, Spanish painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona. A museum dedicated to his work, the Fundació Joan Miró, was established in his native city of Barcelona in 1975, and another, the Fundació Pilar i...

Raymond Fernand Loewy was one of the best known industrial designers of the 20th century. Born in France, he spent most of his professional career in the United States where he influenced countless aspects of North American culture. Among h...

Capital, one of Marx's major and most influential works, was the product of thirty years close study of the capitalist mode of production in England, the most advanced industrial society of his day. This new translation of Volume One, the o...

No child should be allowed to grow up without reading The Jungle Books. Published in 1894 and 1895, the stories crackle with as much life and intensity as ever. Rudyard Kipling pours fuel on childhood fantasies with his tales of Mowgli, los...

Gavrilo Princip was a Bosnian Serb and Yugoslav nationalist associated with the movement Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia). Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, in Sarajevo on 28 June...

Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer, novelist, philosopher, and prominent member of the Huxley family. He graduated from Balliol College at the University of Oxford with a first class honours degree in English literature. The aut...