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The Great Infidel: A Life of David Hume

by Roderick Graham

ISBN: 9781841585208
Imprint: Birlinn
Publication Date: Jan 2004
Format: Paperback
Price: £9.99
Stock Status: in stock

Library shelves groan under the weight of academic critiques of David Hume’s philosophy and in-depth studies of his political economy. This book, however, is not one of those scholastic tomes. Rather, this is the story of the life of the famous philosopher, one of Scotland’s greatest men.

Through Hume’s life, we are shown the Enlightenment from its roots, through its sometimes difficult growth to its flowering in eighteenth-century Edinburgh. Using original sources, some for the first time, we witness Hume’s disappointment with the reception of his Treatise of Human Nature – ‘it fell deadborn from the press’ – although it is now seen as a pivotal work in European thinking, and follow his adventures during a farcical invasion of France. His Essays and History at last brought him the fame he had sought, but also caused the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland to attempt to excommunicate him. The accusation that Hume was an atheist is disproved while, more light-heartedly, his time as a diplomat shows him at the heart of the gossip of pre-Revolutionary Paris, where he was ‘Le Bon David’.

Back in Edinburgh, James Boswell nicknamed him ‘The Great Infidel’ yet, like everyone else, sought invitations to Hume’s well-stocked table and wine cellar. Hume never married, although he was always a favourite with the ladies for whist and conversation, and he was involved in a preposterous courtship in Turin. He also had a lengthy intellectual involvement with a married aristocrat who was already another man’s mistress.    

Click here to hear Roderick in conversation on Australian national readio about David Hume. 

Roderick Graham has enjoyed a long and varied career in television and radio as a writer, freelance director and producer. He produced the double Emmy award-winner Elizabeth R in 1971, and from 1974 to 1977 he was the producer of fifty-four episodes of the long-running BBC police series Z Cars. He was appointed head of drama at BBC TV Scotland and produced and directed A Scots Quair, Boswell for the Defence and Sutherland’s Law among many others. He eventually returned to freelance directing and worked on the well-known TV series Juliet Bravo, One by One and All Creatures Great and Small. Also a lectuer on writing and directing, he is the author of the critically acclaimed John Knox: Democrat (Hale, 2001) An Accidental Tragedy: The Life of Mary, Queen of Scots also published by Birlinn. 

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