Van Loon's Lives,: Being a true and faithful account of a number of highly interesting meetings with certain historical personages, from Confucius and ... to us as our dinner guests in a bygone year

This book tells the story of the lives, the backgrounds, the achievements, and the personal philosophies of nearly half a hundred of the great men and women of the past; from Plato to Confucius to Chopin and Emily Dickinson. This is the story of the aspirations of mankind, of the never-ending struggle for liberty of mind and action. The reader meets these personalities, Robespierre, Saint francis, QE1, and all the others, at a series of weekly dinner parties, delightfully mythical dinner parties which the author and a friend are alleged to have given a few years ago at his ancestral home in the little old village of Veere, in the Dutch coast.