Voltaire: Philosophical Letters: Or, Letters Regarding the English Nation (Hackett Classics)

it was rental

A very strong study. It took weeks to read it all.

If you get this at a low enough price, you won't be disappointed: this is a sort of "meeting minimum expectations" effort, neither informative for a non-specialist, nor impressive for a specialist. The publisher should have chosen someone else to write an introduction (or the notes, throughout)… someone who finds the politics of the era (and the political consequences of this particular book) sincerely interesting. The layout and format of the text is poor: the endnotes should instead be footnotes, and when you do bother to hunt these endnotes down, you'll be disappointed that you're provided with very little historical context (for the obscure characters and situations alluded to), so you'll end up googling it anyway. It's not a good version of Voltaire's text, but it's in English, and it exists. If it's cheap enough, you probably won't complain… much… but this is "bare minimum" quality, as a book.