Nixey writes with forensic, impassive precision about the fantastical myth woven about the body of a theology which has distorted opinion, crippled spiritual sense, duped so many innocents and distorted intellectual clarity for centuries. Religion, the root of so much evil behaviour, religion vaunting itself as the saviour of mankind, and the Bible as a ‘love letter from our Father in heaven.’ The mind clear of this pernicious rubbish reels; preaching balderdash in the name of the only true sense, the single purest reason.
Nixey has done any thinking individual a great service in exposing the mendacity with generous scholarship and in sturdy prose. Admittedly, she did not need to convince me but there may be many others who do need to have the scales taken away from eyes blind to trickery and delusion, the pomposities and sheer baloney of scripture. I’ve listened to it and watched people nodding complacently at the so-called verities of what a half-starved prophet tramping about in the desert came out with aeons ago. It’s pathetic and disturbing, both. That level of stupidity makes the flat-earth brigade look almost on song. Nixey has done what was much needed, she has written a compelling, highly readable account of to what depth gullibility has been plunged.
'Heresy is a brilliant book' - The Times 'Enthralling' - The Sunday Telegraph
'In the beginning was the Word,' says the Gospel of John. This sentence - and the words of all four gospels - is central to the teachings of the Christian church and has shaped Western art, literature and language, and the Western mind.
Yet in the years after the death of Christ there was not merely one word, nor any consensus as to who Jesus was or why he had mattered. There were many different Jesuses, among them the aggressive Jesus who scorned his parents and crippled…
Another book that I approached with some trepidation, acquainted as so many of us are, at a distance, of the cruelty of the Japanese against their prisoners during WWII. Australians feel the influence of the Japanese far more closely from territorial proximity and infusion of culture.
Flanagan, whose own father was captured by the Japanese takes on a huge task: to seek to explain, to understand and to place sympathy where sympathy is due. He brings to light, for example, the fact that Japanese soldiers behaved as they did because they knew that if they didn’t do so, through a dogmatic hierarchy from Emperor to army officers and the ordinary soldier they would suffer similarly; in fact, many of their soldiers were miserably ill-fed, ill-clad and maltreated. This is not to excuse and Flanagan avoids any weepy conclusions. He boldly tells the story as it was, not as any of us would choose it to be. Yes, ‘horror is horror’ as he writes, no getting away from it and, one might say, underpinning this compelling story of what we may consider unaccountable crime is the very fact that war itself is the crime of all crimes, the catalyst for all the horror wrought in its name by men forced to abide by its dictates, a brutal reduction: kill or be killed.
Forever after, there were for them only two sorts of men: the men who were on the Line, and the rest of humanity, who were not.
In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Burma Death Railway, surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle's young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever.
This is a story about the many forms of love and death, of…
The emotions probed and explored in this book lie at the root of our most basic anxieties, uncertainties and bewilderment. There is, too, a long section which speaks of the clandestine resistance to the Nazis within Germany which I found particularly enthralling, being someone who greatly admires the courage and action of Sophie Scholl and Die Weisse Rose. There is an audacity about Lessons which I admire, a capacity to cut to the bone and McEwan delivers a particularly devastating denunciation of the crippling effect on learning, scholarship and culture made by the long dominance of civilisation by Christian and church bigotry.
The novel tells a good story, swinging from incomprehension to learning to disillusion, both the damage and the ultimate benefit of human experience which life brings in its trail. Like the savagery wrought by hedge cutters passing down a narrow lane to leave clean passage.
McEwan writes fluently and with ease and I was glad that I pushed aside my initial reluctance to read the book, very glad.
Discover the Sunday Times bestselling new novel from Ian McEwan.
Lessons is an intimate yet universal story of love, regret and a restless search for answers.
When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has descended, young Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. Stranded at boarding school, his vulnerability attracts his piano teacher, Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade.
Twenty-five years later Roland's wife mysteriously vanishes, and he is left alone with their baby son. Her disappearance sparks of journey of…
Many later readers have echoed what an early reader told me about this novel, based on a true story related to me some thirty years ago by a man who heard it from the man himself. He said: ‘I couldn’t stop reading but didn’t want it to end…quite a predicament.
