Dark secrets at heart of the enlightenment

Sometimes the smaller venues have the biggest surprises (is anyone else wryly amused by the phrase "Irvine Welsh has sold out"?), and you wouldn't have thought that the combination of an exuberant, cinematic romp like GW Dahlquist's The Dark Volume would work beside a melancholy, experimental novel like Thomas Glavinic's Night Work: but it did.

Dahlquist told me later about the forthcoming final volume of his trilogy – "given how America's going at the moment, I can't help but have things falling apart politically", he said.

It seemed appropriate that AC Grayling, who has a mind like the Encyclopaedia Britannica, was there to praise the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which has shuffled off the mortal coil of paper and ink to exist purely as an e-book. I suppose the more gossipy Wikipedia still has its uses though: for example, you might learn that Grayling is a vegetarian, and that the charming carnivore-haven Café Saint Honoré might not therefore be the first choice for the post-event dinner… Still, when Grayling praises the virtues of the Enlightenment, Charlotte Square can seem like a glimpse of that ideal.