Новости за 13.08.2016

After losing his sense of smell, John Sutherland re-reads the books of George Orwell, and finds them changed. In everyday life smell may be the least of the senses, but in Orwell it is everywhere. Perhaps Orwell even invented what we now call the smell-test: “Socialism, at least in this island, does not smell any longer of revolution and the overthrow of tyrants; it smells of crankishness, machine-worship, and the stupid cult of Russia. Unless you can remove that smell, Fascism may win”

Frederick the Great, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were among the many admirers of Pierre Bayle, the ­”forgotten hero” of the Enlightenment. Voltaire called him “immortal” — but his reputation scarcely survived his death in Rotterdam in 1706. His passion for religious tolerance, though radical and brave at the time, was soon a commonplace; and he was a horribly long-winded writer, with the result that his ideas are associated now with other thinkers who expressed them more crisply