In the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin, Karl Marx was beatified, while the West demonised him as the begetter of all evil. In this biography Francis Wheen for the first time presents Marx the man in all his fiery brilliance and frailty: as a Prussian Jew who became a middle-class English gentleman; as an angry agitator who spent much of his adult life in scholarly silence in the British Museum Reading Room; as a gregarious and convivial host who none the less fell out with almost all his friends; as a devoted family man who impregnated his housemaid; as a deeply earnest thinker who loved drink, cigars and jokes; and as a prodigal son.
Karl Marx emerges here as a flamboyantly unmistakable individual, not the stony head of a monolithic, faceless organisation. Francis Wheen has written a captivating, at times richly comic biography of the dominant figure of our century, whose life and ideas, charm and irascibility are here revealed in all their glorious complexity and contradiction, the brilliant and provocative philosopher living the Dickensian life of a gent fallen on hard times.
