Book reviewed in this issue

Priests are both flesh and spirit
Freeing Celibacy
Donald Cozzens
Reviewed by Peter Cornwell

In the Blood
Andrew Motion
Reviewed by P.J. Kavanagh

The Inheritance of Love
Kiran Desai
Reviewed by Mian Ridge

Consuming Passions: leisure and pleasure in Victorian Britain
Judith Flanders
Reviewed by Catherine Pepinster

1956: power defied
Peter Unwin
Reviewed by David Goodall

Shadow of the Silk Road
Colin Thubron
Reviewed by Simon Scott Plummer

Previous weeks reviews

Iraq: When fools rushed in
Fiasco: the American adventure in Iraq
Thomas E. Ricks
Reviewed by Robert Fox

Nobody Told Us We Are Defeated: stories from the new Iraq
Rory McCarthy
Reviewed by Robert Fox

The Franciscans in the Middle Ages
Michael Robson
Reviewed by Nicholas Vincent

Leonard Woolf: a life
Victoria Glendinning
Reviewed by Robert Nye

Sovereign
C.J. Sansom
Reviewed by David McLaurin

Palladio’s Venice: architecture and society in a Renaissance republic
Tracy E. Cooper
Reviewed by Andrew Schering

Still angry puritans at heart
God Won’t Save America
George Walden
Reviewed by Gerard Baker

Love and Louis XIV: the women in the life of the Sun King
Antonia Fraser
Reviewed by Nigel Aston

The Battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939
Antony Beevor
Reviewed by Michael Burleigh

The Worst of Evils: the fight against pain
Thomas Dormandy
Reviewed by Anthony Daniels

The Silent Steppe
Mukhamet Shayakhmetov
Reviewed by Raymond Edwards

Essence of Prayer
Ruth Burrows OCD
Reviewed by Christopher Howse

My Music in London 1945-2000
John Amis
Reviewed by Nicholas Kenyon

Daughter of the Desert: the remarkable life of Gertrude Bell
Georgina Howell
Reviewed by Kathy Watson

Dead Man in Paradise
James MacKinnon
Reviewed by Austen Ivereigh

Imperium
Robert Harris
Reviewed by Anthony Lejeune

Joan of Arc: maid, myth and history
Timothy Wilson-Smith
Reviewed by Melanie McDonagh

Anglo-Catholic Platitudes
Betjeman
A.N. Wilson
Reviewed by Raymond Edwards

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda’s road to 9/11
Lawrence Wright
Reviewed by Michael Holland

Restless
William Boyd
Reviewed by david McLaurin

The Shark God: encounters with myth and magic in the South Pacific
Charles Montgomery
Reviewed by Margaret Taylor

The Bloodless Revolution: radical vegetarians and the discovery of India
Tristram Stuart
Reviewed by Krishna Dutta

The Fall of Troy
Peter Ackroyd
Reviewed by Philip Womack

A restless heart keeps its secrets
Donne: the reformed soul
John Stubbs
Reviewed by Christopher Howse

A Pocket Guide to Ethical Issues
Andrew Goddard
Reviewed by David Albert Jones

Please visit The Tablet Bookshop.