By RUADHÁN MAC CORMAIC [Dublin Review of Books] – In L’an 2440 (The Year 2440), the best-selling and recently reissued utopian novel by Louis-Sébastien Mercier published in 1771, the narrator falls asleep after a discussion about the injustices of Parisian life and wakes up in the same city seven centuries later. Mercier, a prolific writer in the literary underground of the late ancien régime, embraced Enlightenment faith in progress; his utopia was not a distant land but a familiar city transformed by time into a version of his ideal society. It was an orderly place. Public spaces had been reshaped and the roads made wider, healthcare had improved, clothes were more comfortable and torture had been outlawed. There were no armies, taxes, prostitutes, aristocrats or beggars. Moderation and modesty had replaced abundance and conceit.
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also reeks of stale tobacco, evidence perhaps not so much that intellectuals smoked more than others of their time, but that they lingered longer over their books than those whose tastes ran to lighter literature. The Autobiography is certainly worth lingering over; in his edition of the correspondence of Mill and Harriet Taylor, F. A. Hayek proposed that the Autobiography would be Mill’s most enduring work, read when even 
had been forgotten.
, a follow-up of sorts, a decade on, to his excellent 
.
fails, despite its best efforts and intentions: it is a book of academic celebrity gossip.
(2007), shattered a lot of the Diana mythology in which Blair seems stuck like a fly in amber. Yes, as Blair contends, Diana was “hunted down” by the paparazzi and the editors who paid huge sums for pictures of her and her lover, Dodi Fayed. Yes, she was a devoted mother to her two sons, and, yes, her royal husband was a callous, self-absorbed bore of dubious metaphysics and equally dubious morals.
(1936) traced the early Western ideals of romantic love from the 13th century poem Roman de la Rose, with its notion of a knight’s choice of a single love object, as in the choice of a single rose in a garden of beautiful blooms. Lewis goes on to explore the difference between sacred and profane love: the Christian love of agape, with its self-sacrificial, non-judgemental ideal of universal respect, as opposed to the erotic romantic ideal of exclusive, self-interested possession. Yet, understandings of love and relationships alter with the wheel of history. How different Prof. Terry Eagleton’s secular version of agape, severed from its religious origins, as the capacity to allow others to flourish, expounded in his book 
(2007). How different again, from the romantic tradition traced by Lewis, is the version of romantic love promoted by sociologist Prof. Anthony Giddens. 
(Chatto & Windus, £20) fascinatingly maps the connections between Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Edward Thomas, Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg et al. They shared over-lapping experiences not only of war but of literary influences, such as the distinguished publisher-poet Harold Monro. He was already steering the Georgian movement, of which several were part, before the outbreak of war.
