I have just got back from the wondrous Foyles Bookshop in Charing Cross Road, having bought two succulent gems..

St Paul: The Misunderstood Apostle has just been published, written by the celebrated religious commentator Karen Armstrong. I always appreciate her balanced assessment of religious questions. Her biography of the prophet Muhammad is very good.

I have had a love/hate relationship with Roger Scruton ever since I was a teenager. I learnt a great deal from his Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein and was almost seduced by his The Meaning of Conservatism. He is famous (or notorious) as a conservative philosopher and has now become almost respectable as a professor of philosophy at Oxford University. In his own gentlemanly way he is an iconoclast of all things Marxist and left-wing. In his new book, just published, he takes apart some of the most fashionable thinkers in our universities such as Slavoj Žižek and argues that empty rhetoric abounds over careful analysis, and nonsense triumphs over decent logic. So Scruton claims. I look forward to reading his assessment.

Categories: Books, Christianity, Philosophy, Politics, Recommended Reading