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, André 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.
About the Author: John James O'Loughlin was born in Galway City, County Galway, the Republic of Ireland, of Irish- and British-born parents in 1952. Following a parental split while still a child, he was brought to England by his mother and grandmother (who had initially returned to Ireland with intent to stay) in the mid-50s and subsequently attended schools in Aldershot (Hampshire), and, following the death and repatriation of his grandmother, Carshalton Beeches (Surrey), where, despite an enforced change of denomination from Catholic to Protestant, he attended a state school. Graduating in 1970 with an assortment of CSE's (Certificate of Secondary Education) and GCE's (General Certificate of Education), including history and music, he moved the comparatively short distance up to London and went on, via two short-lived jobs, to work at the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music in Bedford Square, WC1, where he eventually became responsible, as a clerical officer, for booking examination venues. After a brief flirtation with Redhill Technical College back in Surrey, where he had enrolled to study history, he returned to his former job in the West End but left the ABRSM in 1976 due to a combination of factors and began to dedicate himself to writing, which, despite a brief spell as a computer tutor at Hornsey Management Agency in the late '80s and early '90s, he has continued with ever since. His novels include Changing Worlds (1976), Cross-Purposes (1979), Thwarted Ambitions (1980), Sublimated Relations (1981), and Deceptive Motives (1982). From the mid-80s Mr O'Loughlin more or less exclusively dedicated himself to philosophy, which he regards as his true literary vocation, and has penned more than sixty titles of a philosophical order, including Devil and God - The Omega Book (1985-6), Towards the Supernoumenon (1987), Elemental Spectra (1988-9), and Philosophical Truth (1991-2). John O'Loughlin lives in Crouch End, north London, England, UK, where he continues to regard himself as a kind of bohemian intellectual.