Born in 1961, US anthropologist and activist David Graeber was weaned on leftist politics, and declared himself an anarchist at age 16. He became an anthropology professor, and his early cultural research in Madagascar exposed him to poverty that he saw as caused by pressures to repay excessive government debt.

Kantorowicz's 1957 study of 1,200 years of monarchy has had a profound affect on the way academics think about the study of history.

Philip Zimbardo is fascinated by why people can behave in awful ways. Some psychologists believe those who commit cruelty are innately evil. Zimbardo disagrees.

Ways of Seeing is a key art-historical work that continues to provoke widespread debate. It is comprised of seven different essays, three of which are pictorial and the other containing texts and images. Berger first examines the relationship between seeing and knowing, discussing how our assumptions affect how we see a painting.