Józef Hieronim Retinger was a Polish politician, scholar, international political activist with access to some of the leading power brokers of the 20th century, a publicist and writer.

Joseph Conrad was a Polish-British novelist and story writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language; though he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he came to be regarded a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. He wrote novels and stories, many in nautical settings, that depict crises of human individuality in the midst of what he saw as an indifferent, inscrutable and amoral world.