Adam Kirsch is an American poet and literary critic.

Kirsch is the son of lawyer, author, and biblical scholar Jonathan Kirsch, and a 1997 graduate of Harvard College.

Kirsch was the book critic for the New York Sun until it ceased publishing in 2008. He was previously the assistant literary editor for The New Republic, “no small achievement for a writer in his 20s.” He is also the author of the weekly column "The Reader" on Nextbook. Richard John Neuhaus writing in First Things called Kirsch “a literary critic of some distinction.” Writing in The Nation, John Palattella describes Kirsch as “the intellectual offspring of the New Formalists, a small group of poets and critics—among them Brad Leithauser, Timothy Steele and Dana Gioia (head of the National Endowment for the Arts)—whose essays and poems in defense of traditional formal conventions were championed by The New Criterion during the 1980s.” He writes regularly for Slate , The New Yorker, The Times Literary Supplement, and other magazines. Kirsch is a contributing editor to Harvard Magazine.

Adam (Hebrew: אָדָם‎, Arabic: آدم‎, Syriac: ܐܵܕ݂ܵܡ) is a figure in the Book of Genesis, the Qur'an and the Kitáb-i-Íqán. According to the creation myth of Abrahamic religions, he is the first human. In the Genesis creation narratives, he was created by Yahweh-Elohim ("Yahweh-God", the god of Israel), though the term "adam" can refer to both the first individual person, as well as to the general creation of humankind. Christian churches differ on how they view Adam's subsequent behavior (often called the Fall of man), and to the consequences that those actions had on the rest of humanity. Christian and Jewish teachings sometimes hold Adam and Eve (the first woman) to a different level of responsibility for the Fall, though Islamic teaching holds both equally responsible. In addition, Islam holds that Adam was eventually forgiven, while Christianity holds that redemption occurred only later through the sacrifice of God's son, Jesus Christ. Bahá'í Faith, Islam and some Christian denominations consider Adam to be the first Prophet.

Philip Milton Roth (born March 19, 1933) is an American novelist. He gained fame with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, an irreverent and humorous portrait of Jewish-American life that earned him the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. In 1969 he became a major celebrity with the publication of the controversial Portnoy's Complaint, the humorous and sexually explicit psychoanalytical monologue of "a lust-ridden, mother-addicted young Jewish bachelor", filled with "intimate, shameful detail, and coarse, abusive language".

Roth has been one of the most honored authors of his generation: his books have twice been awarded the National Book Award, twice the National Book Critics Circle award, and three times the PEN/Faulkner Award. He received a Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 novel, American Pastoral, which featured one of his best-known characters, Nathan Zuckerman, the subject of many other of Roth's novels. His 2001 novel The Human Stain, another Zuckerman novel, was awarded the United Kingdom's WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year. His fiction, set frequently in Newark, New Jersey, is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "supple, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of Jewish and American identity.

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (French pronunciation: [maʁsɛl pʁust]; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time; earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past). It was published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927.

Proust was born in Auteuil (the southern sector of Paris' then-rustic 16th arrondissement) at the home of his great-uncle, two months after the Treaty of Frankfurt formally ended the Franco-Prussian War. His birth took place during the violence that surrounded the suppression of the Paris Commune, and his childhood corresponds with the consolidation of the French Third Republic. Much of In Search of Lost Time concerns the vast changes, most particularly the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the middle classes that occurred in France during the Third Republic and the fin de siècle.

Proust's father, Achille Adrien Proust, was a prominent pathologist and epidemiologist, responsible for studying and attempting to remedy the causes and movements of cholera through Europe and Asia; he was the author of many articles and books on medicine and hygiene. Proust's mother, Jeanne Clémence Weil, was the daughter of a rich and cultured Jewish family from Alsace. She was literate and well-read; her letters demonstrate a well-developed sense of humour, and her command of English was sufficient for her to provide the necessary assistance to her son's later attempts to translate John Ruskin. Proust was raised in his father's Catholic faith. He was baptized (on August 5, 1871, at the church of Saint-Louis d'Antin) and later confirmed as a Catholic, but he never formally practiced that faith.

Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield, KG, PC, FRS, (21 December 1804 – 19 April 1881) was a British Prime Minister, parliamentarian, Conservative statesman and literary figure. He served in government for three decades, twice as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Although his father had him baptised to Anglicanism at age 12, he was nonetheless Britain's first and thus far only Prime Minister who was born into a Jewish family—originally from Portugal. He played an instrumental role in the creation of the modern Conservative Party after the Corn Laws schism of 1846.

Although he was a major figure in the protectionist wing of the Conservative Party after 1844, Disraeli's relations with the other leading figures in the party, particularly Lord Derby, the overall leader, were often strained. Not until the 1860s would Derby and Disraeli be on easy terms, and the latter's succession of the former assured. From 1852 onwards, Disraeli's career would also be marked by his often intense rivalry with William Ewart Gladstone, who eventually rose to become leader of the Liberal Party. In this feud, Disraeli was aided by his warm friendship with Queen Victoria, who came to detest Gladstone during the latter's first premiership in the 1870s. In 1876 Disraeli was raised to the peerage as the Earl of Beaconsfield, capping nearly four decades in the House of Commons.