"The Popes" by John Julius Norwich

Written in 2011 and therefore missing out the resignation of Benedict XVI and the new Pope Francis, this covers 265 men over 2000 years in 450 pages; few popes receive more than a few paragraphs and judgements necessarily lack nuance. The overall impression is that the incumbents of the papacy are either holy men, wholly unsuited to the tasks of leading a church, or that they believe the propaganda about infallibility and become authoritarian despots with no ability to understand that alternative perspectives from their own might exist let alone be valid, or that they are crooks and probably corrupt to boot. It seems that out of 265 only a handful have managed a consistently good job.

The other impression is that, certainly in the days before antibiotics and decent medical care, electing an old man to a job was a recipe for instability. Given the average papal reign is less than eight years long and given the human predilection for voting next time for the opposite of what you have got, it seems miraculous that the church still exists.

But these are superficial impressions. The other thing about this book is that there are a lot of fascinating characters and papal history is a lot of fun. Although some of the theological disputes are so abstruse and difficult to understand that even JJN finds it difficult to explain them. Has Christ two separate natures, one human and one divine or only one and if so is it human or divine and if not can the two both coexist or does one (and which one) predominate? I'm still confused as to what 'monophysite' means and what the doctrinal differences are between the Catholic and the orthodox, not to mention Copts, Nestorians and the rest.

There was one moment which I hated: "Attila, like all his race, was incorrigibly superstitious": even if you can assign a 'race' to Attila it can surely not be correct that every last member of that 'race' is superstitious let alone incorrigibly so. Please lose this lazy thinking if another edition is to be prepared.

I also found the numbers for the coronation feast for Clement VI inbelievable. There were three thousand guests. According to the quoted source they ate, each one, on average, one third of a sheep, three hens, half a goose, fifty cheeses, and seventeen tarts and cattle, calves, kids, pigs, and pike as well and drank at least four litres of wine. I just don't believe that possible.

But there were moments of wonder.

• French King John II was captured by the English at Poitiers and released pending ransom in exchange for hostages including his son; when his son escaped he voluntarily returned to captivity. That's chivalry!
• Deposed as ruler of Naples by Urban VI, Joanna was imprisoned by her replacement, papally sponsored Charles, and suffocated.
• Once there was a pope and an antipope, one in Rome and one in Avignon, some cardinals decided to resolve the situation by declaring them both deposed and electing another. This led to three popes. The new one (JohnXXIII) was an ex-pirate who, while papal legate to Bologna, "seduced 200 matrons, widows and virgins, to say nothing of an alarming number of nuns". "As Edward Gibbon delightedly noted, 'the most scandalous charges were suppressed: the Vicar of Christ was only accused of piracy, murder, sodomy and incest." Having eventually been deposed they made him a Bishop!
• Pope Pius II as a young man was caught in a storm on a voyage to Scotland; having pledged a pilgrimage to the nearest Virgin Mary shrine if he was spared "he duly trudged over the frozen earth to the holy well at Whitekirk" which, although only 5 miles "he found that he had lost all sensation in his feet" and suffered arthritis for the rest of his life.
• Sixtus IV, a Franciscan monk who loved poverty, changed completely on becoming Pope. "He spent money like water" and to fund it had to sell offices: "He bestowed the see of Milan on an eleven-year-old and the archbishopric of Lisbon on a boy of eight." But he was the one who built the Sistine chapel.
• A church council in Milan in 1511 "was openly ridiculed to the point where a local chronicler forbore to record its proceedings because, he claimed, they could not be taken seriously, and anyway he was short of ink"
• Leo X had a catamite who was a singer, the son of a Turkish Prince. This Prince had lived for years in the Vatican having fled Istanbul after attempting a coup against his brother, the Sultan. Gay Leo was the Pope who gave Henry VIII the title of Defender of the Faith, a title the British monarch still flaunts.
• There were two expeditions to reclaim Crete from the Turks in 1668 and 1669. The first "consisted largely of aristocratic young Frenchmen who fought only for their own glory; in their opening battle they showed considerable courage, but when it was over the survivors could not get out fast enough" The story of the second was "much the same, but without the courage."
• Gregory XVI's (1831- 1846) "mind was totally closed to progress, or indeed to any innovation"; he "banned the new railways - which he called chemins d'enfer"
• John Paul II "surprised everybody ... in his berserk canonisations of everything in sight ... he canonised no fewer than 483 new saints, more than had been made in the previous five centuries."

An interesting book. November 2016; 450 pages

"Judas" by Peter Stanford

It is difficult to write a book about someone when the evidence base is as small as it is for Judas; there are just twenty-two mentions of Judas in the gospels. As a result, much of the book dealt with the resonances of Judas through history and interpretations of the Judas legend through art right up to Jesus Christ Superstar.

The book starts, as all serious works seem to these days, by a chatty account of the author doing his research, in this case looking around the nunnery in Hakeldama, the Field of Blood outside Jerusalem where Judas is supposed to have met his end. He then progresses to the gospel accounts, showing how the story of the betrayal of Jesus grew from the earliest sources, the epistles of Paul, in which Judas is not mentioned by name, to Mark's gospel which mentions Judas three times but recounts only the bare facts of the betrayal, to Mark and Luke who begin to give more motivations and finally John who adds dialogue and incident. This analysis of the story points out the three great mysteries:

• What would have happened if Judas hadn't betrayed Jesus? If there had been no crucifixion it would have undermined the whole point of God sacrificing his own son for the atonement of the sins of humanity. So Judas was necessary to the divine plan. Jesus seems to acknowledge this by showing fore-knowledge of what Judas is about to do at the Last Supper. So was Judas just a pawn in God's master-plan? And if he was, then can he be held guilty?
• The crucial message of Jesus is forgiveness of one's enemies. So why wasn't Judas forgiven? When Jesus died on the cross he descended into hell and 'harrowed' it, releasing the sinners who had died before the resurrection. Judas would have been there by then (having remorsefully committed suicide). So why wasn't Judas released?
• Why did Judas kiss Jesus in the act of betrayal in the Garden of Gethsemane? The traditional answer is that Judas had to identify Jesus but over the past week Jesus had scarcely been unidentifiable: he has overturned tables in the Temple and staged furious face to face debates with the authorities. The kiss was not necessary. Yet it is included even in Mark's stark account.

From this last point, Stanford elaborates a theory that made me sit up and think: it is the details that seem to be superfluous that are most probably authentic. The gospel writers were writing to an audience and for propaganda purposes. They may have made things up in order to hammer home doctrinal points. One can therefore suspect everything in the gospels but the least suspicious are the details that really don't matter. Another example Stanford makes is the moment when Peter and another disciple run to the tomb but the unnamed other runs faster than Peter. A silly little detail, and therefore probably true,. he concludes.

What else did I learn from this book?

• Judas had a father called Simon Iscariot. The sharing of the surname suggests that they both came from Qeriot, a town south of Jerusalem, which makes him the only disciple not from Galilee.
• Judas was often called 'Judas the Jew' (although all the disciples and Jesus himself were Jews) and therefore used to engender anti-Semitism through the ages.
• Judas is often shown in profile in mediaeval art to symbolise the fact that he is two-faced.
• Judas often wears yellow and has red hair in medieval art; these are both symbols that he cannot be trusted.
• Judas is often portrayed with red spots or rough blotchy skin; one French name for measles is the Judas disease.

Although there are times when I felt the book could have been a little shorter, in view of the limited primary evidence, Stanford has produced a readable history and an enjoyable book. April 2015; 276 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Brunelleschi's Dome" by Ross King

This is the story of the biggest dome in the world, the dome on the Duomo (the 'House of God', the cathedral) in Florence and the man who built it, without internal scaffolding, defying all expectations and critics, when no one knew how it could be built.

My wonderful wife, Steph, and I went to Florence this year; above is my picture of the Duomo showing Brunelleschi's dome. Now that I have read the book I want to go back to see it again; now I understand what is so incredible about the construction. Mind you, now that I understand more about the unorthodox details of the construction and I know how heavy just the lantern on top of the dome is, I am not sure I want to clamber up into the roof space and stare out from the lantern at the rooftops of Florence. Scary!

There is a lot in the book that I didn't properly understand. There were a lot of technical challenges to overcome. Just hoisting massive blocks of stone to the required height was difficult with the technology of the day (the main system was powered by an ox trudging round and round and there was a complicated system of gears including a type of clutch so that stuff could also be lowered while the ox trudged in the same direction). It was difficult to understand how the mason's could reach the overhanging bricks they were building. The problem with a dome or an arch is that it isn't really stable until the keystone is put in at the end; this is why arches are usually built on top of a wooden construction which is then taken away when the arch is finished. Brunelleschi didn't do this (it would have taken too long to source all that wood). How did they build it without it falling down? The other problem is that a dome converts the downward weight of the roof into an outwards thrust which is usually countered using buttresses. Brunelleschi used no buttresses. Instead he used circular rings of stone like coopers use iron staves around barrels. I still didn't really understand.

Not only does the book fascinate with the details of the unprecedented construction but it also has brilliant vignettes of Florentine life. There is a wonderful story about Brunelleschi playing a practical joke on a carpenter to convince him that he had swapped identity for 24 hours with someone else. The bemused carpenter ended up leaving Florence and making his fortune in Hungary. Time and again, King provided wonderful details and I wanted to know how he could find out so much about a time so long ago. 

In every way this book was brilliant. This year I have also read Ross King's Leonardo and the Last Supper which was also excellent. These two books are both among my top five non-fiction for 2014 and I shall definitely seek out more by this brilliant author.

December 2014; 167 pages

I have now also read the wonderful and brilliant The Judgement of Paris: as the Second Empire dies in the chaos of the Franco-Prussian war, the Siege of Paris and the Commune of Paris, Impressionism is born: Meissonier, Manet, Monet and many more.