The Corporation is not some neutral umpire but a potent actor in the nation’s affairs

The BBC has wholeheartedly thrown its lot in with the liberal reformers; there has been no “impartiality” on any of the big moral issues of the past half-century. In every instance, the socially conservative argument has been depicted as callous, reactionary and dogmatic. Any counterargument to the prevailing liberal consensus is now ignored altogether; social

The Pope Who Would Be King by David Kertzer, Random House, 512pp, £25 For a 21st-century English Catholic, stepping into the world described in David Kertzer’s new book is to enter a landscape as unfamiliar as it is shocking. Though this work describes events in the mid-19th century, the character of the papacy, which is

The Tragedy of Property by Maxim Trudolyubov, Polity, 226pp, £17.99 In the mid 1990s I did a stint in the BBC’s Moscow bureau. It was high summer, some of the resident correspondents were away on leave and nothing much was happening. They were dog days, stiflingly hot, and Moscow seemed a defeated, depressing and occasionally

Seven Ways of Looking at Religion by Benjamin Schewel, Yale, 248pp, £35 Like many of us, I suspect, I have not spent much time considering religion, its history and development from a purely intellectual standpoint. It has been enough to spend time in the pew pondering the mysteries of Christianity, my own failings, and how

To Fight Against This Age – On Fascism and Humanism by Rob Riemen, WW Norton, 176pp, £15 Is the continent of Europe and the wider world menaced by the rise of fascism? In the view of the Dutch humanist philosopher Rob Riemen it most certainly is, and this short book is his analysis and antidote

Rome: A History in Seven Sackings by Matthew Kneale, Atlantic, 464pp, £20 Any writer undertaking a history of Rome must take a very deep breath: here is a historical canvas so broad that most would blanch at the prospect. The longevity of Roman civilisation means that any attempt at a comprehensive linear history would present

It seems another age but there was a time when the commentariat hailed George Osborne as a political genius. That was in the early years of the Coalition government of 2010, but after some ham-fisted budgets and an ill-conceived EU referendum campaign (Osborne was the mastermind of the Remain effort) opinions have been revised drastically