Catholicism

Maggie O’Farrell’s two previous historical novels, Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait, made her a household name. Land marks a return to her Irish roots: ‘Every family has its myths and ours was that my great-great-grandfather had worked on the early maps of Ireland.’ The year is 1865 and 31-year-old Tomás, a mapmaker, accompanied by his ten-year-old son Liam, is in the employ of the English redcoats and tasked with surveying and mapping Ireland from top to bottom, rocky outcrop to drumlin.

Northern Italians sometimes speak of Sicily as the place where Europe finally ends. The island was conquered in the 9th century by Arab forces from north Africa, who left behind mosques and orchards of pistachio and almond. The Arab influence remains strongest in the Mafia-dominated west of Sicily where the sirocco blows in hot from Tunisia. Leonardo Sciascia, the Italian detective novelist and essayist, was born in Racalmuto in western Sicily in 1921. The town takes its name from the Arabic rahal maut, ‘dead village’, after Arab settlers found the area devastated by plague. It appears thinly disguised as Regalpetra in Sciascia’s work. For years the Mafia infiltrated the town’s sulphur industry, but the mines are derelict now and the landscape looks denuded.

General Franco died on 20 November 1975, and with the 50th anniversary just passed, this biography – the first in years – of the man who ruled Spain with an iron fist for nearly four decades is timely, incisive and authoritative. Written by a former Madrid correspondent of the Economist, it’s also an up to date and highly accessible introduction to 20th-century Spanish history. Born in 1892 into a middle-class family, Francisco Franco shared a bedroom with his younger brother Ramon, who later won international fame as Europe’s ‘equivalent of Charles Lindbergh’. There were few signs, however, that eminence also awaited Francisco. A weedy child, who dutifully got by at school, he had a difficult relationship with his domineering Freemason father.

Religious conversions do not, for the most part, make for good anecdotes. An exception can be found in Patricia Lockwood’s memoir Priestdaddy, which describes the author’s father Greg’s road to Damascus experience in a nuclear submarine off the coast of Norway, where he watched The Exorcist 72 times: That eerie, pea-soup light was pouring down, and all around him men in sailor suits were getting the bejesus scared out of them, and the bejesus flew into my father like a dart into a bull’s eye. It was, Greg boasted, ‘the deepest conversion on record’.

A foul-mouthed fantasist with a chin like an ironing board starts a wild conspiracy theory about the King’s brother. An alcoholic racing fanatic turns his gambler’s eye to the ballot box. A maniacal preacher gives such a polarising sermon that he paints himself as a second Christ and tours the country as a sex symbol. These are not the inventions of William Hogarth or Jonathan Swift; they are the figures who divided our political system in two, as George Owers tells us in his delightful new history of the birth of party politics. The Rage of Party traces the fevered rise of Whigs and Tories during the reigns of William III and Queen Anne.

The Delft painter Johannes Vermeer, now probably the most beloved artist of the Dutch Golden Age, had an unusual career. His reputation in his lifetime was small. For some reason he painted almost exclusively for the van Ruijvens, so only those who knew the family would have been able to view much of the work. One foreign observer who did see a painting owned by a baker (probably handed over in security for a large overdue account) was incredulous at what the owner claimed was the value of a small picture by an unknown artist. After Vermeer’s death, and the sale of the collection for very little on the death of his patrons’ son-in-law, his name disappeared. He is hardly ever mentioned in any of the exhaustive and insightful 18th-century histories of Dutch painting.

I have to be honest: I’ve never been much concerned with what happened in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1387. I suspect that may even be true for many Lithuanians. In Silence of the Gods, Francis Young pinpoints this year – of the conversion of the duchy to Christianity – as the official triumph of Christianity in Europe over paganism and idolatry. But he then goes on to examine the debris – and the survivors of paganism and their traditions in the northern regions of Europe. The first difficulty is defining and identifying paganism. The book is published by Cambridge University Press, so there is an unmistakably academic, seminar-ready, conference-hardened edge to the text.

Blaise Pascal resists definition. During a short life (he died in 1662, aged 39) he invented the calculator, laid the foundations for probability theory and created the first public transport system. He was also an austere Catholic, whose call for a return to strict Augustinian doctrines put him outside the religious mainstream. As a philosopher, he is remembered today for his ‘wager’ argument – a challenge to atheists, framed as a cosmic gamble. As Graham Tomlin shows in this lively, conversational biography, Pascal worked in threes, often steering a course between extremes.