The stories of 10 outstanding intellectuals of the twentieth century. Bright, exceptional, prickly, cheeky — as soon as they did not call these women for their ability to strike with words and thoughts. The world would be completely different without Dorothy Parker's caustic arguments about the absurdity of life, without Rebecca West's ability to retell half of world history in one travel diary, without Hannah Arendt's ideas about totalitarianism, without Susan Sontag's arguments about photography, without Nora Ephron's skeptical attitude to feminism, without Janet Malcolm's statements about traps and buns in psychoanalysis and journalism. And the biographies of intellectuals are even more striking if we recall that they achieved success in the twentieth century, when women spoke in full voice for the first time in history and it turned out that they had something to say.