Sometimes a book is so compelling you have to recommend it before you’ve finished it. I might have known that Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia by John Gray (Penguin) would be good, but this time the master really has excelled himself. Iraq, Gray writes, “has ceased to be a contest in which secular ideologies are at stake and has become instead a many-sided war of religion entwined with an ongoing resource war”. Another magnificent work from the greatest philosopher writing today.

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