There is a remarkable nimbleness of style, a balancing act of tone, in Voltaire, which is hard to bring off on stage. When you speak the words out lo….

Voltaire's novel [Candid] offers us parallel universes, the possibility of entering into alternative worlds existing side by side, and this is someth….

Twenty years ago, when you bumped into someone and asked how they were, they would say, 'Mustn't grumble' or 'Getting by': now they feel obliged to s….

It's a book that makes me laugh and think - it would be very hard to like someone who didn't enjoy Candide!.

Translating Candide into tweets has really deepened my appreciation of his writing - it wouldn't work so well with nineteenth-century authors. Every ….

I have not chosen to create a linear story, but a series of different narratives: in the end there are five plays that almost, but don't quite, add u….

We are now so far advanced in our denial of evil that we want to rationalise it away..

In the business world, the idea of positive thinking is absolutely entrenched..

The title's so upfront. It gives fair warning about the play's content. I'm writing about a kind of disenchantment, an anger, but quite a cool 90's a….

Optimism and happiness are not the same thing, but they are becoming interchangeable, and it seemed to me that Voltaire's Candide gave me a way into ….

There is the question of language. Although the play [Candid] is not written in strict verse form, there is an underlying beat of rhyming couplets, w….

Rereading Candide, I was struck by the link between optimism and the optimal, the idea that we have been placed in this optimal world rather than som….

The financial crisis happened because no-one could actually say out loud how bad things were..

Theatre within theatre, when characters sees themselves on stage, always raises philosophical questions of choice and free will..

I have adapted the whole book [Candid] into tweets of 140 characters, and these are being sent out daily, at the rate of eight tweets per day ..

Also, everyone thinks they know Candide - you hear people described as 'Panglossian'. So if Candide appears on a poster, it feels familiar..

The American journalist Barbara Ehrenreich has written about this in her book Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World (2009)….

Even within single sentences, there are sudden changes of register. And when the travellers go to Venice, they see a play by Voltaire! This is a nove….

Candide is one of those books I read when I was young and that I come back to regularly..