Boom and bust: A thoughtful examination of Britain’s uncomfortable role in the development of India

The pastiche-Georgian architecture patronised by the Prince of Wales in such little townships as Poundbury, just outside Dorchester, attracted much mockery – some of it from my pen. Toytown, I thought. Where’s the exuberant confidence of real neo-Georgians such as Lutyens who could adapt, without copy-catting, the triumphs of 18th-century design? Then again, ask yourself

Christianity in the Twentieth Century by Brian Stanley, Princeton, 504pp, £27 A cynical old priest of my acquaintance, long dead, and so politically incorrect as to be, perhaps, scarcely quotable in 21st-century print, once said to me: “I never take much comfort from those who tell us that the Church is flourishing in Africa, even

The Darkening Age by Catherine Nixey, Macmillan, £20 European Christians are perhaps tempted to think of the classical past as one which was gently absorbed into their own religious framework. Dante, supposedly in 1300, was guided by Virgil into the infernal realms. Renaissance poets invoked Apollo and the Muses. Titian painted Venus and Diana the

At times, Roy Hattersley’s account may make readers ashamed to be English

The Catholics by Roy Hattersley, Chatto and Windus, £25 Roy Hattersley is the son of a Catholic priest, as he recounts in the opening pages of this thoroughly entertaining new book. He only discovered the truth when he was 40, after his dad died. “I never wondered why my father – a lowly local government

This stunning first novel about the 'Michelangelo of Suffolk' brings the 19th century vividly to life

The Huntingfield Paintress by Pamela Holmes, Urbane Publications, £9 Reading this novel sent me off to the depths of rural Suffolk, to the village of Huntingfield, so I could see for myself the phenomenon which it describes – a medieval church, restored in Victorian times, and painted up to the nines by Mildred Holland, wife