Rowan Williams

The essay presents Jason Arday’s rise from lifelong disadvantage to a position of influence as followed by relentless public attacks and tragic death. It argues that modern media and online commentary reproduce ancient rituals of scapegoating, public humiliation and sacrificial violence, challenging the belief that contemporary society has outgrown these patterns.

Joseph Luzzi’s study of Dante explores the long afterlife of the Commedia beyond its explicit politics. The book examines the poem’s encounters with ecclesiastical suspicion and orthodoxy, its role in establishing Italian literary language, and its changing status from a defining expression of Romanticism to a work reclaimed by modernists including Joyce, Pound and Eliot.

A review of Pope Francis’s autobiographical meditations, which begin with the 1927 sinking of the SS Principessa Mafalda because his grandparents were due to travel on it. The book explores his Italian migrant roots, upbringing in Argentina and experiences within the Jesuit order and Argentina’s repressive political environment. Although Francis offers limited detail about those years, the review notes that he implicitly corrects claims that he failed to oppose dictatorship, highlighting his advocacy for political prisoners and involvement in helping some escape.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s biography of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, examines how appeals to past military victories shaped political debate in pre-Civil War England. Buckingham became the focus of growing anger over failed foreign policy, despite bearing only partial responsibility, and his inability to answer his critics helped deepen the confrontation between the Crown and Parliament over funding. The review presents him as charismatic and cultured but lacking practical political intelligence, while arguing that this wider conflict indirectly contributed to the English Civil War.

A review of Anthony Seldon and Tom Egerton’s collection of 15 essays argues that the United Kingdom’s 14 years of Conservative-led government were defined by underachievement, weak competence and chaotic policymaking. While acknowledging major external shocks including the Eurozone crisis, the pandemic and wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, it emphasizes missed opportunities, Brexit’s self-inflicted costs and austerity’s long-term damage to public services, economic resilience and public trust. The period is portrayed as having lowered expectations and deepened alienation and political disengagement among vulnerable citizens.

Edith Hall’s book examines suicide through Greek thought and her family’s history of suicide, emphasizing the severe and potentially transgenerational harm experienced by survivors. It distinguishes euthanasia for people facing inevitable, agonizing death from temporary suicidal impulses, and argues that people considering suicide should recognize the violence and lasting trauma their deaths can inflict on others. Hall also recounts her own struggle with suicidal depression and the role that concern for survivors played in helping her endure it.