The Lunar Men: The friends who made the future by Jenny Uglow, Faber and Faber, £25, ISBN 0571196470
ANGLO-SAXONS like me tend to be sniffy about the Enlightenment. Like sex in the afternoon, it’s the kind of thing we’d rather leave to Continentals (and Scots). The late Roy Porter dragged us from our closet. In Enlightenment, he showed that the Enlightenment was as much a phenomenon of 18th-century England as of France, Prussia and Scotland. He gave particular credit to a “gathering of Midlands intellectual aristocracy” called the Lunar Society, so named because it met in Birmingham each month on…
