Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

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Yet this may actually be the book for you; the modern secular world many have unshackled itself from Christendom. Prefiguring the book, in 2016 Holland penned an essay in the New Statesman describing how he was "wrong about Christianity". Gregory of Nyssa defined the institution of slavery as an unpardonable offence against God at a time when most Christians and others took it for granted.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.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 .

Tom Holland has previously written several historical studies on Rome, Greece, Persia and Islam, including Rubicon, Persian Fire, and In the Shadow of the Sword.

As he says, “the trace elements of Christianity continued to infuse people’s morals and presumptions so utterly that many failed even to detect their presence. Holland traces back to christian lore concepts and ideas nowadays erroneously thought of as universal, as naturally emergent, while in fact they are culturally contingent and stem from Christianity - human rights, abolition of slavery, secularism, gender identity, equality of sexes, etc. He is the author of 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 his history of the Graeco-Persian wars, won the Anglo-Hellenic League’s Runciman Award in 2006; Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom, a panoramic account of the two centuries on either side of the apocalyptic year 1000; In the Shadow of the Sword, which covers the collapse of Roman and Persian power in the Near East, and the emergence of Islam; and Dynasty, a portrait of Rome's first imperial dynasty. Even St Paul might join the critics to some extent - whilst Holland quotes him in Romans 2:15 - "God's law is written in their hearts" as something as a theme that leads to departure from scripture and religious laws, most interpretations rather see this as Paul explaining that right and wrong have always been discernible to some extent by nature - hence the emphasis on natural law moral philosophy within the Catholic Church. Jesus may not have been a Lenin, but it might have suited the Jewish leaders to persuade Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, that he was.