happiness, which he called ‘the world’s fastest growing religion’, as his theme, and used what he called ‘free history’ to unravel its ambiguities. In this book he imagines what would happen if all humans could be successful, if they could attain total bliss, if all disease was eliminated and if death itself could be endlessly postponed. It is written in the form of a satirical fable about a young woman who obtains a tourist visa for a holiday in Paradise, where she discovers that the inhabitants, both famous and obscure, are not as comfortable as she expected; they are still struggling with peculiarities of character from which they can no more free themselves than they could on earth. The bizarre situations they find themselves in, and the antics they get up to, are fictitious, but everything about what they did and said on earth is historically exact. People who would have preferred to have lived in a different century discover that they can do so in Paradise, which is divided like a multi-storey car park with each century on a different level, and no one is condemned to exist for all eternity among fashions they detest. Lost souls can devote themselves to correcting misapprehensions about themselves, since few ever felt they were fully understood by their contemporaries. Henry Ford, for example, continues to be angrily resentful of the criticism he received when alive, and he becomes a preacher of his own Gospel, trying to convert God to it, expounding his beliefs about the dangers of making a profit – which the businessmen of his time could never appreciate. Paradise is where many, exhausted by life, want nothing more than undisturbed sleep, and, above all, where it becomes clear that there are other goals apart from happiness. Zeldin argues that happiness is too easily converted into self-satisfaction and complacency, and he asks how people can claim to be happy when there is so much suffering and sorrow around them and when they have themselves experienced so little of life. This book was variously seen as an answer to Orwell's pessimistic vision of the future, as a 'wickedly funny and very wise satire', as a burlesque of academic illusions, and as 'the maddest novel ever written'. It attracted particular attention from women commentators, who called it 'one of the most significant books of our time', 'pointing out paths hitherto unnoticed rather than