The Life and Life of David Pangloss

The Pangloss family has a sense of its own great past, which it harnesses to wrestle and rise above the grim poverty of pre-war Liverpool. Despite the harsh reality of their circumstances there is a life affirming energy and hubris in the Pangloss myth that they inhabit the best of all possible worlds. As the family diaspora continues through war, pestilence, and tragedy in the twentieth and then twenty-first century these deep-rooted notions are continually challenged and the subject of se...