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

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

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

Translating Candide into tweets has really deepened my appreciation of his writing - it wouldn't work so well with nineteenth-century authors. Every single sentence in Voltaire seems to advance the story, and yet stand alone as a sound-bite.

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.

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, with echoes of Pope and the tradition of eighteenth-century philosophical verse.