The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession, by John Cornwell (Profile Books, €20.99/£16.99)

This pamphlet is adapted from a lecture which Dermot Lane, the retired president of the Mater Dei Institute, gave to a conference on religions and beliefs in primary education held at St Patrick’s College back in April 2013. He drew on some of the material in the Report on Patronage and Pluralism in the Primary…

In the history of biblical archaeology, as it developed during the Victorian era, no episode is more remarkable that the discovery made by George Smith of the British Museum in 1872. On a clay tablet from the royal library of Nineveh he deciphered a much older Mesopotamian version of the flood story familiar from the…