Books

A life in defence of tradition: Michael Davies reconsidered

Leo Darroch’s new biography explores how a schoolteacher became a leading voice in debates over liturgy and doctrine

An uninspiring portrait

Christopher Lamb offers a serviceable overview of the challenges facing Pope Leo XIV, but his analysis rarely moves far beyond the obvious

Melanie McDonagh

Evelyn Waugh’s death, sixty years on

Evelyn Waugh died on Easter Sunday 1966, after Mass and Holy Communion; six decades later his Catholic imagination remains as striking as ever

Sacramental imagination and the recovery of enchantment

Modernity claims to have stripped the world of meaning, but Tolkien offers a vision in which reality remains charged with significance

The return of wonder

Medieval mystery plays and Shakespeare point to a culture that once understood wonder and what has been lost in its absence

Conscience and catastrophe in the Thirty Years’ War

A powerful German novel explores how the fraught relationship between faith and political power sowed the seeds of disaster

Francis Phillips

Agatha Christie and the reality of sin

At the heart of the mystery writer’s anthropology lies the conviction that sin is a cancer to which none of us is wholly immune

Clement Harrold

Perceiving God in creation: the angel-filled world of Francis Thompson

Through poetry shaped by suffering, Francis Thompson urges us to recover the vision of a world still radiant with God’s presence

Contextualising the Great Seige

A review of The Great Siege of Malta by Marcus Bull

Reason, doubt and grace in Why I Am Not an Atheist

Part memoir and part intellectual history, Christopher Beha explores how honest scepticism can ultimately make belief possible again

Nick Ripatrazone