Talk:Robert Payne (author)

Name
On Amazon Books, there are separate entries for Pierre Stephen Robert Payne and for Robert Payne. Are these two people or one? Someone with access to the British Library index or similar should be able to clarify it. Maybe also let Amazon know their indexes are wrong.

I originally added him as Robert Payne, on what is now the disambiguation page. --GwydionM 12:00, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

Marx Biography
Recently acquired the Payne bio of Karl Marx and it is riveting! And it covers all the "suppressed" subjects of the incredible life of this remarkable individual. If I could write one book of this quality I would certainly call it a great life. But to discover the guy wrote 110 (!) titles defies the imagination. Please add on, anybody!--Oracleofottawa (talk) 04:23, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Schweitzer Biography
This facsimile of a book contains a title page and an index. There is no Foreword by the author about his purpose in creating the work, nor how he went about it. There is no list of References. Such information as is available appears only upon the printer's dust jacket, which is lucky to survive 53 years later. The writer of the dust jacket text has Robert Payne opining that biographies of Schweitzer "have been, for the most part, overly reverent, or cloyingly eulogistic". Payne has the gall to reinterpret "Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben". Payne "takes up the catch phrase 'Reverence for Life' and he shows that what Schweitzer meant was something vaster and more dangerous and harder to live with than is popularly supposed". There is no evidence to suggest the author made any effort to meet Dr. Schweitzer in person.

Mental health professionals sometimes use an interesting term: narcissistic personality disorder.

Sources for "Biography of Hitler" section?
Completely unsourced section, added tag. Nirvana2013 (talk) 08:11, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

no scientific background?
Robert Payne must have been a person without scientific skills, according to this article? This might explain some of the poor content of his biographic books? 188.104.38.168 (talk) 21:09, 13 December 2020 (UTC)


 * I see no sense at all in this comment. And no source is given.


 * The books were widely admired and some are still in print.--GwydionM (talk) 08:38, 14 December 2020 (UTC)