What was the best time and place to be alive?
In our November/December issue a panel of writers, starting with the historian Patrick Dillon, tackled the second of our Big Questions: what was the best time and place to be alive? You may think it's a no-brainer: today in the West people have longer lives, better health and more equality than in the past. But as Dillon points out in his piece, this is also a question "about lifestyle and ideas, people and manners, things that ebb and flow". There may have been a spot of the plague about in 1599, but you could also see Shakespeare's plays performed for the first time. Athens in the fifth century BC was fighting the Peloponnesian War but also giving birth to democracy while Socrates taught Plato philosophy. Dillon opted for London in the 1690s, when, he wrote, "The modern world is starting, and I want to be there."
Five other contributors came up with their own answers: Arkady Ostrovsky argued that Russia between the 1870s and the 1900s was the best time to be alive, and Robert Guest that it was Heian-era Japan (784-1185AD). Lucy Kellaway went for the Pacific north-west coast of America c.15,000 BC; J.M. Ledgard for Princeton in 1949; and Ann Wroe for early childhood. Which do you think most persuasive? Perhaps none of them at all. Have your say by voting in our poll below.
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quote It's often seemed to me that Shakespeare might well have been a simply brilliant editor as well as a beyond-extraordinary writer