Thinking Out Aloud

James Carroll, the author of Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews – A History is a former Catholic priest. This only one of inn...

It is an old saw that journalism is the first draft of history. New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright’s T he Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Roa...

Some books just have irresistible titles and Rich Merritt’s Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star was such a book for me. It turned out to be a...

Some time ago, I was thinking about when was the happiest time in my life, and I realised the happiest time in my life was this time. A lot...

Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species is possibly the scientifically and intellectually most important book of the modern era. It was cert...

The Rev. Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population was one of those runaway intellectual successes that turns its author’s n...

When folk use the term imperialism nowadays, it is almost taken as read that one means Western imperialism. Yet, if we take Western civili...

Brian Daizen Victoria’s Zen at War is a study of how Zen Buddhism became deeply complicit in Japanese militarism. Brian Victoria, a Soto B...

Bernard Lewis’s Race and Slavery in the Middle East (originally published in 1990), is a slim volume examining attitudes within Islam on ra...

David Kertzer’s The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism is a moving demolition of Catholic a...