Soren Kierkegaard's childhood was clouded by the religious fervour of his father. Studying both theology and the liberal arts, he began to criticize the Christianity upheld by his father and look for a new set of values. He wrote no...

"In the vast literature of love, The Seducer's Diary is an intricate curiosity--a feverishly intellectual attempt to reconstruct an erotic failure as a pedagogic success, a wound masked as a boast," observes John Updike in his foreword...