Perhaps with a degree of calculated exaggeration, Jacques Attali said in 2012 that of all the personalities whose biographies he had written, from Pascal to Karl Marx, from Gandhi to Diderot, Diderot’s was the one that had made him most enthusiastic about current affairs: ‘In my opinion, in a century’s time, he will probably be the only philosopher of the Enlightenment to see his star rise. The only one, in any case, who will still be useful to us, both for his ideas and for his way of thinking’. According to Diderot, ‘Pirandello, Beckett, Butor and Kundera, in particular, found some of their inspiration in Diderot’. Indeed, Diderot, best known as the editor of the Encyclopédie or Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, is a thinker who deserves to be studied today far beyond his work as an editor. This second volume in the ‘Entr’acte’ series takes a critical look at Diderot’s thinking on the theatre, the arts and the sciences, and at his fortunes in France and abroad, particularly in Portugal and Spain.