A personal view by Kenneth Clark

'The smile of reason... it seems to us shallow - we've got into deep water in the last 50 years;... but it didn't preclude some strongly held beliefs - belief in natural law, belief in justice, in toleration, in humanitarianism.'
The sensible, sophisticated men and women who met in the salons of 18th-century Paris wanted to change society. In the end they got more of a change than they had bargained for. The polite reunions in those elegant salons became precursors of revolutionary politics.
Kenneth Clark's theme takes him from great palaces like Blenheim and Versailles, to Edinburgh and to the hills of Virginia, where Thomas Jefferson made his home in the 1760s.
(Book £4.75, paperback £2.25: see p58)