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“... a time, a distinguished French Department in a well-known British university set a question on Diderot in its Final Examination. Owing to a couple of unfortunate misprints, his name appeared as ‘Piderst’. Understandably, it was not a popular question. But it did attract one answer, from a candidate who discussed the merits of Piderst with ...”

“... Denis Diderot, the hero of Malcolm Bradbury’s new novel, has one niche in the English language with ‘esprit de l’escalier’, his only entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations: ‘An untranslatable phrase, the meaning of which is that one only thinks on one’s way downstairs of the smart retort one might have made in the drawing room ...”

“... see that such ‘visual primacy was by no means without its complications’. And he refers us to Diderot’s Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who Can See, written in 1749. This Letter has now been translated for the first time in more than two centuries by Kate Tunstall, who accompanies it with a stylish and subtle interpretive essay. It was written ...”

“... advocates’, as Burke called them, to the highest positions of power. Consider the case of Denis Diderot, born the son of a cutler in the small Burgundian town of Langres, who ended his days hobnobbing with some of France’s greatest aristocrats, not to mention his patron Catherine the Great (not to be confused with her Latvian predecessor). Or ...”

“... let the title be a warning. But then there is not much sign that the general editor, Denis Hollier, has tried to keep his authors in check, or sent round a reminder that, as the publisher’s foreword squarely promises, this is a literary history directed at the ‘general reader’. The general reader of today will have to be a whole lot smarter ...”

“... combine philosophical articles of the kind Rousseau had contributed to the great Encyclopedia of Diderot and D’Alembert with a biographical dictionary of musicians was to create a new attitude to scholarship. Typically, it was more scientific than Germanic ‘style history’. Ambros and later Riemann, the next of the great music historians, had to create ...”

“... Englishmen were so remarkable. Even the word ‘suicide’ was coming into French from English. Diderot, one of the pioneers we hear most about, won increasing assent for his ideal of survival, not as a ‘soul’, but in the memories of fellow mortals, and this guerdon was being thought of now as earned, not by warlike glory and carnage, but by service to ...”