Two biographies that changed my mind. Gerard Kilroy’s Edmund Campion: A Scholarly Life (Ashgate, £80) vividly sketches the intellectual worlds of Oxford and Prague in the first half of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. They were not as cut off from each other as we might suppose. Campion, one of the men who connected the two, dominated his time with impressive composure, even as he suffered appalling treatment. Too late for last year’s best books was The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope by Austen Ivereigh (Allen & Unwin, £20), which shows why Pope Francis is not a silly old commie. The author’s insights into his Argentine background and hard spiritual road make sense of his rejection of the trappings of power and intellectual elitism. I now like Campion and Francis much more than I did.
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