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Books

Brains with green fingers

A review of Damon Young’s Voltaire’s Vine and Other Philosophies. Gardens: Voltaire loved them, Satre hated them, Proust was allergic to them, and Orwell gardened himself to death

5 April 2014

9:00 AM

5 April 2014

9:00 AM

Voltaire’s Vine and Other Philosophies Damon Young

Rider, pp.200, £12.99, ISBN: 9781846044175

‘Life is bristling with thorns,’ Voltaire observed in 1769, ‘and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one’s garden.’ This is the remedy espoused by Candide at the end of Voltaire’s satirical novel, published ten years earlier, and the literal and metaphorical cultivating of gardens is the subject of Damon Young’s sprightly and stimulating little book.

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