IAN DAVIDSON graduated in Classics from Cambridge and joined the Financial Times in 1960. Reporting on European news, he was the newspaper's Brussels and Paris correspondent for many years and Foreign Affairs columnist on his retirement in 1997. The Trials of Voltaire is his first book.

In Voltaire In Exile, Ian Davidson has recreated this brilliant period in the life of one of the giant figures of the Enlightenment. And by painstakingly translating the rich correspondence between Voltaire and his family, members of the Court at Versailles and the French intellectual elite, Davidson allows us to discover Voltaire the artist, the campaigner, the aesthete, the lover, the humorist. The result is a wonderfully vivid portrait of this extraordinarily funny, iconoclastic, complex and above all ferociously intelligent individual: 'the unique man of the century' (Diderot).