Voltaire
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
The future of opera – I hope: WNO’s Candide reviewed
Bernstein’s Candide is the operetta that ought to work, but never quite does. Voltaire’s featherlight cakewalk through human misery, set…
An old Encyclopaedia Britannica is a work to cherish
The encyclopaedias of the past were volumes to be savoured – even if they often contained unsavoury views, says Rose George
The Enlightenment was a many-splendoured thing
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…
What did the ancient Greeks believe?
It is a curious fact that the modern Hebrew for ‘atheist’, Tim Whitmarsh notes in passing, is apikoros. The word…
The ruthless Romanovs’ horrible history
It’s hard to tell at times who came off worst in Romanov Russia — the tsar or his subjects, says Adam Zamoyski
Has the Archbishop of Canterbury forsaken God?
The Archbishop of Canterbury, we heard during the BBC’s Songs of Praise broadcast last Sunday, ‘doubted God’ after the Paris…
Crossed swords and pistols at dawn: the duel in literature
Earlier this century I was a guest at a fine dinner, held in a citadel of aristocratic Catholicism, for youngish…
Alexander Pope, inventor of celebrity
‘The Picture of the Prime Minister hangs above the Chimney of his own Closet, but I have seen that of…
Brains with green fingers
‘Life is bristling with thorns,’ Voltaire observed in 1769, ‘and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one’s garden.’…
Mark Ravenhill’s take on Voltaire’s Candide
Ah yes, Candide, the adventures of an innocent abroad in ‘the best of all possible worlds’, as philosophers of the…
