Paul Vallely (Letters, 20/27 December 2014) understandably takes exception to Austen Ivereigh’s charge of “an attempt to reconcile the ‘conservative’ Jesuit of the 1980s with the ‘progressive’ bishop of the 1990s by imagining a kind of conversion experience in Córdoba”. Vallely’s Pope Francis: untying the knots, published in 2013 is I am convinced a most helpful book for those of us trying to understand a seemingly contradictory but radical pope, a man who admits he has made mistakes. Now Ivereigh has been able to publish his own The Great Reformer: Francis and the making of a radical pope, which his publishers describe on the cover as “the authoritative biography”. Michael Walsh’s review (Books, 13 December) of this