Richard Appignanesi graduated with a doctorate in classical art history. He was the founder and co-director of the Writers & Readers Publishing Cooperative and Icon Books where he originated the internationally acclaimed Introducing series. His own best-selling titles written for that series include Freud, Postmodernism and Existentialism. He is the author of the fiction trilogy Italia Perversa (Stalin's Orphans, The Mosque and Destroying America) and the recent novel Yukio Mishima's Report to the Emperor. He is currently associate editor of the art and culture journal Third Text and reviews editor of the policy and futures studies journal Futures. He is presently at work on two new explanations of existentialism, Is There Meaning? and The Age of Postculture.