Portraits

Comprising thirty-three biographical sketches of some of the twentieth-century's most influential and powerful people in both politics and the arts, including Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, de Valera, Mussolini, de Gaulle, Ben-Gurian, Andre Malraux, Bertrand Russell, Salvador Dali, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Aldous Huxley, Portraits (1985) seeks to provoke as well as to praise, and should prove of interest to those who are curious to learn how various exceptional men - and one exceptional woman - measure up to a Social Transcendentalist analysis or, more correctly, to the scrutiny of someone who approaches life from a specific ideological standpoint with a view to measuring the achievements of others in relation to it. Although Mr O'Loughlin had dealt with some of the subjects, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Aldous Huxley, before (see 'Becoming and Being'), the treatment of them here is much more subjectively critical and thus a reflection, in large measure, of the way his thinking had progressed during the intervening three years since his earlier excursion into biography, which, characteristic of a more relativistic approach to literature typifying him at that time, also embraced a series of autobiographical sketches. No such relativity applies here, however, although the choice of both politicians and artists is anything but absolute, as suggested by the subtitle."