A C Grayling
Great Minds Don’t Think Alike
Rousseau's Dog
By David Edmonds and John Eidinow
Faber 405pp £15.99 order from our bookshop
The Courtier and the Heretic
By Matthew Stewart
Yale 351pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
It should be acknowledged as a universal truth that if one person helps another, the latter will forever resent the former, because it is uncomfortable to be in moral debt. The only way to avoid this outcome is for help to be recompensed, either by a return of favours or – better far – by an undertaking from the helpee to find an opportunity to help someone else in future, thus passing onward the good deed.
The universal truth at the hub of these remarks is well illustrated by the case of the quarrel between that unpleasant, egomaniacal, paranoid, toxic, ghastly genius Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and that unimpeachable man of reason, amenity, civilisation, and yet greater genius, David Hume. As the epithets here suggest, I am of
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'Two things prevent [this book] from collapsing under the weight of its own wayward ambition. Colin Jones, one of the finest living scholars of early modern France, is no ordinary historian. And the day in question, 27 July 1794, was no ordinary day'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/night-of-the-guillotine
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