Holland contends that every idea, every event, practically every thought is either a development from, or a reaction against the influence of the world’s central defining life: the life of Christ. Yet he writes as an unbeliever about ‘the most influential framework for making sense of human existence that has ever existed’ (519). Like Yuval Noah Harari and Jordan Peterson he knows that absence of meaning will be both the greatest threat and greatest fear of humanity in the twenty-first century. Both his Preface and his final chapter suggest that he personally regrets the loss of it. A historian with a novelist’s gifts Even as Holland’s book draws to a close, ideas seem to cascade out of it. The sexual revolution, which the author can see has presented the churches with agonisingly difficult choices; Martin Luther King’s role in Civil Rights, ‘An orator of genius with an unrivalled mastery of the Bible and its cadences’ (474); a brief discussion of Empire (with a welcome understanding of the abyss between what the missionaries – including Livingstone – were trying to do and their white, plundering, commercially greedy compatriots); Mandela’s realisation that forgiveness might be the most devastating but constructive tactic of all. There is also a fair assessment of the threat from Islamism and how the West responded. While this is the central argument of the book - that two thousand years of Christian teaching have so subsumed our thought process that we can no longer easily detect them - the message is delivered via a narrative “History of Western Christianity”.

You can, however, make a fetish or idol out of anything, as Freud instructs us. Such false gods fill every chapter of this illuminating study. Yet Holland is surely right to argue that when we condemn the moral obscenities committed in the name of Christ, it is hard to do so without implicitly invoking his own teaching.

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Little more than 250 years later, the Church was burning its first heretic in the history of the Latin West. Christian was persecuting Christian. Yet at the same time the Church became independent of the State (211) allowing it to be free of corrupt kings and emperors who would pollute it. The drive for purity therefore was paradoxically directly connected to a need to cut out the cancer that might destroy the whole. But diagnosis was never an exact science and many (all?) excisions were needless. And so it was to be until Europe, exhausted by the Wars of Religion, made peace with itself in 1648. So much had been lost but Christianity still endured. I'm not the book's target audience (as a trained church historian), and as such (which was not at all apparent from the cover or description), learned nothing that I didn't already know, except for the name of the first person to invent the concept of human rights (Bartolome de Casas) and how the Protestant British Empire forced the matrix of 'religion' as something separable from state, culture, race and descent etc. on other peoples like the Hindus (already knew it did that for the Jews). A great story well told, Dominion, the Making of the Western Mind is well worth investing the time to read, exploring the strangeness of Christianity but also its centrality to our modern Western mindset. Holland hosts (with Dominic Sandbrook) the no.1 podcast The Rest is History. He has written and presented a number of TV documentaries for the BBC and Channel 4, on subjects ranging from religion to dinosaurs. He served two years as the Chair of the Society of Authors; as Chair of the PLR Advisory Committee and was on the committee of the Classical Association. Tom Holland is an award-winning historian, author and broadcaster. His bestselling books include Rubicon: The Triumph and the Tragedy of the Roman Republic, which won the Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize; Persian Fire, which won the Anglo-Hellenic League's Runciman Award; Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom; In the Shadow of the Sword: The Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World; Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar; and Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind.

Lady Elizabeth of Hungary was a young lady who had it all. Daughter of King Andrew II of Hungary, she had been successfully married off at 14 to a German Duke - a husband she seems to have been devoted to - and lived with all the trappings of luxury in a Thuringian (ie German) castle. The trouble was, as Tom Holland tells us in Dominion: the Making of the Western Mind, that while she had it all, she didn’t want any of it. A give-awayGraeco-Roman religion is painted in a warped light. The central role of Pagan temples in banking and civic activities is ignored and instead we are given gruesome descriptions of altars constructed entirely of blood and crazed rapist gods. This conveniently ignores the presence of those such as Asclepius, whose staff is still the symbol of the medical profession, whose temples were the first hospitals, and of the more rational side of Greek religion such as Orphism. Indeed, Orphism and the dying and rising god motif had a significant impact on Plato and Christianity. But Plato, the father of Greek philosophy, is barely given a sentence in this book, with the focus on his student Aristotle. To ignore the influence of the Platonists and Orphism on Early Christianity is like describing Tudor England without mentioning Henry VIII. Only by doing so is Holland able to advance his thesis of Christianity as a unique revolution rather than an evolution of the Graeco-Roman world. You can never escape your past – or at least your Christian past. Such seems to be the central idea in Tom Holland’s aptly named book, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. But is the idea alarming or reassuring? It will depend on how the reader views the world. Whichever you think, it would be hard to begrudge the author anything less than the highest praise for this superbly narrated history of Europe and the West’s religious and cultural heritage in which he traces its influence down the ages from Jesus (and before) to the #MeToo campaign. Puritans, then, even as they rejected the old and familiar, could not entirely deny a lurking paradox: that their rejection of tradition was itself a Christian tradition. Shortly before the author plunges us into the maelstrom of Victorian ‘science’ he makes an important point again about the word ‘secular’. He has already told us of its ultimately Christian origins but now reminds us that the concept is not one of neutrality as so many today like to think. The word, he says, should act as a signpost to the fact that there are two worlds and to Christianity’s infinite capacity for evolution. The current reviewer would say that ‘secular’ reminds us that such a world is limited to the viewpoint of its own day. A viewpoint that cannot see beyond its own closed presuppositions and which enclose it in a tiny ‘windowless’ universe (as C.S. Lewis once said). These are surely useful ideas for Christians to be familiar with. Victorian science By this stage of the book it is hard, if one looks at the wood rather than the trees, to avoid the impression that the Church has been in a state of constant revolution and reform. Febrile, passionate, ever looking for an unobtainable lasting purity, it has all too frequently been its own worst enemy while at the same time providing society around it with an unrivalled and constant source of purpose, direction and hope. It was true especially of those who looked to America to provide the virgin territory wherein to start afresh. Philadelphia may not have lived up to its name but by 1758, any Quaker found to be trading in slaves would be disciplined. That was not something Britain would achieve for another fifty years.

Here, Holland resists the idea that the modern, post-Enlightenment West is devoid of Christianity; rather, he uses radioactivity as a metaphor to say that Christianity has affected everything, even if we don't realize it. Instead of using this metaphor, the book says that the West swims in Christian waters. It begins, of course, in antiquity, Rome and before, and there's a painful bluntness in Holland's attempt to force you to understand how different the Roman mind really was. A Roman citizen could go down to the slave market, buy a group of children, bring them home and use them sexually in every orifice, and never once think he was a bad man for doing so. *gulp* The only value anyone had was their use-value. The idea that all people had inherent dignity was not considered. Respect was commanded by power. Crucifixion was the punishment reserved for the most reviled, and it was horrifying and shameful.In place of 'Dominion', for those with sufficient interest, a short church history like 'Christianity: the first 3000 years', combined with Gregory's 'The Unintended Reformation' to get a better grasp of what exactly is being discussed here, what exactly the thesis is, and stronger evidence for it. Holland runs more along lines of inference, genealogy and family similarity in his arguments. Fair enough you might say, but Holland has come up with so many paradoxes that they end up being cheesily predictable: a bit like the corny “wise man” sayings of a 1980s Hollywood kung-fu master. Downsides? It is his contention that these ideas are not in any way self-evident but are instead the product of a successful two thousand year Christian mission to reshape morality in the West. Bride of Christ