A march that has lost momentum

‘Do not judge a book by its cover’ is not a dictum that applies in the present case. Towards the Light: The Story of the Struggle for Liberty and Rights that Made the Modern West by Mr A. C. Grayling, Printed in the year 2007, sets us up for a rollicking defence of Freedom and Enlightenment in the style of Tom Paine or William Godwin. And that is exactly what we get. This is the story of modern Europe as told by a 19th-century liberal secularist, updated but not fundamentally rethought. Beginning with the horrors of the Spanish inquisition, it moves on to liberators of the mind such as Galileo, Locke and Montesquieu, skips briskly forwards to the realisation of their ideals in the American and French revolutions, and concludes with an impassioned call not to sacrifice the freedoms so painfully won in pursuit of a nebulous ‘war on terror’.