Ferdinand Lassalle was a Prussian-German jurist, philosopher, socialist and political activist who is best remembered as the initiator of the social-democratic movement in Germany. "Lassalle was the first man in Germany, the first in Europe, who succeeded in organising a party of socialist action", according to Élie Halévy. Or, as Rosa Luxemburg put it: "Lassalle managed to wrestle from history in two years of flaming agitation that needed decades to come about".
Ferdinand Victor Henri Lot was a French historian and medievalist. His masterpiece, The End of the Ancient World and the Beginnings of the Middle Ages (1927), presents an alternative account of the fall of the Roman Empire than does Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which had set the tone for Enlightenment scholarship in blaming the fall of classical civilization on Christianity.
Sir William Robert Ferdinand Mount, 3rd Baronet, FRSL, is a British writer, novelist, and columnist for The Sunday Times, as well as a political commentator.
