Celibacy

Japanophiles, look away now. A country renowned for inspiring fascination, warm feelings and not a little envy in its rapidly rising numbers of visitors – from crime-free streets to clean and plentiful public toilets – is in the grip of problems deeper and darker than you might imagine. The classic Japan itinerary reveals little of those problems. You’ll enjoy hyper-modern Tokyo with its fabulous restaurants, flawless transport and non-stop shopping and entertainment. You’ll jostle tourists and schoolchildren for the perfect view of the Golden Temple in Kyoto without losing your enthusiasm for Japan’s ‘eternal city’. Then you’ll fly home with pretty much only good things to say about Japan and

Lower Than the Angels (that is the condition of man, according to the psalmist and St Paul) is a book that combines the two most fascinating subjects, religion and sex – but you do have to take both bits of the agenda. This is Christian history with an eye to marriage, sexual acts, sexuality, celibacy, feminism and gender. Diarmaid MacCulloch is primarily a historian of the Reformation but, as his A History of Christianity (2009) demonstrates, he’s up for the bigger picture. This history takes us from early Jewish concepts of God and sex (I was startled to find the God of Abraham was once assigned a spouse, Asherah) right