Piers Paul Read

Anti-Catholic calumnies remain deeply embedded in our culture. Professor Rodney Stark’s Bearing False Witness hopes to refute them

A filial memoir of Britain’s apostle of modernism in art

Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation surprised the world, but the elderly pontiff leaves office having accomplished his mission

Meaning only to skim through Alain de Botton’s new book Religion for Atheists (Hamish Hamilton, £18.99) I read every word, engaged by his wit and limpid prose, impressed by the sheer plenitude of facts on display, and finally delighted to find such an effective apologia for religious belief. 

Zola inspired other writers and artists to defend the jailed Jewish officer. Yet he himself was not free of the taint of anti-Semitism

Book review of G.K. Chesterton: A Biography by Ian Ker

Men are living for longer than ever and their late-life crises provide a rich seam for the novelist to mine

‘In the 1950s, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene wrote triumphalist Catholic novels with miracles as part of the story — Brideshead Revisited, The End of the Affair. They were bestsellers. Since Vatican II, however, the tenor of Catholic fiction has been doubt, dissent and disillusion.’