Knowing the self-confident patter and cliches of most paperback books on religion, some people may well approach this book armoured in scepticism and even hostility. It is, in fact, a scrupulously wellconsidered history. Islam and Judaism are considered in depth as well as Christianity, and Karen Armstrong points out shrewdly that theism has almost always tended to sit uneasily upon the Western peoples, who have swung between periods of fanaticism and of unbelief. She discusses the almost rationalist deism of Spinoza and the beliefs of Voltaire (an enemy of atheism, though he is often accused of it), Diderot and other figures of the Enlightenment. In our age, a decadent scientific rationalism seems once more to be under attack from the new, emerging fundamentalism.