John Gray is most recently the acclaimed author of Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, Al Qaeda and What It Means to be Modern, Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions and False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism. Having been Professor of Politics at Oxford, Visiting Professor at Harvard and Yale and Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, he now writes full time. His books and articles have been translated into over thirty languages. His selected writings, Gray's Anatomy, were published by Penguin in 2009.
The most prescient of British public intellectuals Financial Times Gray has consistently anticipated the shape of things to come ... he teaches us that true humanism is to be found in uncertainty and doubt -- Will Self The closest thing we have to a window-smashing French intellectual -- Andrew Marr A visionary ... one of the most reliably provocative and heterodox voices in British intellectual life today New Statesman Gray is a philosophical maverick, a pricker of bubbles, a deflater of balloons, a true iconoclast for whom our chief competing accounts of existence - the religious and the humanist - are both fatally flawed Globe and Mail Deeply thoughtful, brilliantly narrated -- Raymond Tallis Literary Review A romp of a read ... John Gray is a connoisseur of human idiocy -- John Banville Guardian Our sharpest critic of utopian fantasies skewers the crazed but enduring dream of cheating age, time and death -- Boyd Tonkin Independent John Gray, the counter-prophet who scorns all claims that humans can transcend the human condition ... You don't have to agree with Gray to enjoy the fireworks -- Marek Kohn Independent Elegant ... He is on to something important regarding the delusion that science consists of indefinite progress Sunday Telegraph Gray is an engaging writer, an entertaining historian and a controversialist whose opinions can never be taken for granted New Statesman