Voltaire
When two worlds collide: Well, This is Awkward, by Esther Walker reviewed
A high-powered childless fortysomething social media exec’s life is turned upside down by the arrival of her 11-year-old niece
‘Poor devils’: the hopeful scribblers of the French Revolution
Buoyed by visions of immortality, Parisian hacks were ready to ‘explode’ in revolutionary fervour, but those who didn’t perish in the Terror would often struggle to make a living
Emilie du Châtelet – a lone voice among Enlightenment thinkers
The brilliant physicist’s warning to her contemporaries not to carry respect for great men to the point of idolatry fell on deaf ears
The problem with westerners seeking oriental enlightenment
Those chasing after blissful satori never seem interested in the people who actually live in Asia. They want to float in higher spheres
The British Empire’s latest crime – to have ended the Enlightenment
Richard Whatmore sees trade and colonisation in the 19th century as the great threat to Enlightenment ideals, and British imperialism as an unremitting force of darkness
All’s well that ends well
Bernstein’s Candide is the operetta that ought to work, but never quite does. Voltaire’s featherlight cakewalk through human misery, set…
A rounded education
The encyclopaedias of the past were volumes to be savoured – even if they often contained unsavoury views, says Rose George
The triumph of independent thought
History used to be so much easier. There were the Wars of the Roses, then the Reformation, the Civil War,…
Hostility to Islam has disguised a host of other prejudices
In 2011, when the editor of Charlie Hebdo put Muhammad on the cover, he did so as the heir to…
War on Mount Olympus
It is a curious fact that the modern Hebrew for ‘atheist’, Tim Whitmarsh notes in passing, is apikoros. The word…
Autocracy tempered by strangulation
It’s hard to tell at times who came off worst in Romanov Russia — the tsar or his subjects, says Adam Zamoyski
Is the Archbishop of Canterbury forsaking God?
The Archbishop of Canterbury, we heard during the BBC’s Songs of Praise broadcast last Sunday, ‘doubted God’ after the Paris…
Swords of honour
Earlier this century I was a guest at a fine dinner, held in a citadel of aristocratic Catholicism, for youngish…
The art of celebrity
‘The Picture of the Prime Minister hangs above the Chimney of his own Closet, but I have seen that of…
Blue-sky thinking
‘Life is bristling with thorns,’ Voltaire observed in 1769, ‘and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one’s garden.’…
Look on the bright side
Ah yes, Candide, the adventures of an innocent abroad in ‘the best of all possible worlds’, as philosophers of the…
