I’m not surprised to see Umberto Eco on that list. He was the first person I ever heard described as a “public intellectual.” That was in the early 1990s, and I was a huge Eco fan at the time, having devoured both The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum (still one of my all-time favorite books). From this fan’s perspective, however, it seemed that Eco’s fiction-writing abilities declined as his reputation as a “public intellectual” soared. His last few books have been meandering messes.