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

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.

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

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 .

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.

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.