Karl Marx (1818-1883) is arguably the most famous political philosopher of all time, but he was also one of the great foreign correspondents of the nineteenth century. During his eleven years writing for the New York Tribune (their collaboration began in 1852), Marx tackled an abundance of topics, from issues of class and the state to world affairs. Particularly moving pieces highlight social inequality and starvation in Britain, while others explore his groundbreaking views on the slave and opium trades - Marx believed Western powers relied on these and would stop at nothing to...

In this stunning book, the first comprehensive biography of Marx since the end of the Cold War, Francis Wheen gives us not a socialist ogre but a fascinating, ultimately humane man, while still examining the criticisms of his detractors. A study in contradictions, Karl Marx was at once a reserved scholar, a fiery agitator, and a gregarious socialite, while his intellect and ideology were once described as "Rousseau, Voltaire, and Hegel fused into one person." He lived both at the center and on the fringes of his age, and his oratory and writing continue to change the contemporary world. In...

In vivid detail, Francis Wheen tells the story of "Das Kapital" and Karl Marx s twenty-year struggle to complete his unfinished masterpiece. Born in a two-room flat in London s Soho amid political squabbles and personal tragedy, the first volume of "Das Kapital" was published in 1867, to muted praise. But after Marx s death, the book went on to influence thinkers, writers, and revolutionaries, from George Bernard Shaw to V. I. Lenin, changing the direction of twentieth-century history. Wheen s captivating, accessible book shows that, far from being a dry economic treatise, "Das Kapital" is...