In his lively, sometimes compelling biography, Jimmy Burns sets out to offer his reader “fresh insight into a key spiritual figure of our times”, cautioning the reader that, nevertheless, this is “not a hagiography”. It is not, he assures us, the story of a “picture-book saint”, but of a “complex man” with a “mixed record”. For example, the book’s most searching chapter, “The Dirty War”, sifts through the evidence for the Jesuit provincial Jorge Bergoglio’s relations with the Argentine military junta in the 1970s. Burns judges that Bergoglio cannot be credibly accused of collaborating with the generals, and yet that his conduct was less than heroic. He cites approvingly the view of Fr Michael Campbell-John