Liberty's rake
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1639547,00.html
James Buchan enjoys Roger Pearson's elegant and learned life of the man
who embodied the Enlightenment, Voltaire Almighty
Saturday November 12, 2005
The Guardian
Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom
by Roger Pearson
448pp, Bloomsbury, =A318.99
Famous in his lifetime as a prolific dramatist and a poet, Voltaire is
not much read nowadays, even in France, and then only for his short
prose tales such as Candide. Instead, he embodies in his career and
makes intelligible in his conversation and letters the great
revolutions of the 18th century in religion, civil rights, finance,
domesticity and sex. As Roger Pearson shows in this elegant, learned
and handsome new biography, Voltaire managed both to be in the thick of
things and to survey them from the sort of Olympian distance that
generally only posterity enjoys.
Voltaire
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/d0f32c9584373a89
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