Quests to rid us of our general nastiness

If you read one book this week

Natural Desire in Healthy Women, by Gary Dexter (Old Street Publishing) R180

Meet Amber Haldane, 1920s contraceptive campaigner, as she bumps heads with the luminaries of the age - HG Wells, TS Eliot, Wilhelm Reich and Gandhi - in her quest to rid the masses of sexual repression and general nastiness. Based - very, very loosely - on the life of birth control pioneer Marie Stopes, Dexter's outrageous social satire is very clever indeed, with filthy jokes about bodily fluids.

The issue

In January I selected Karen Armstrong's Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (The Bodley Head), out on September 25, as one of 2014's notable non-fiction releases. Armstrong, a former nun, attempts to debunk the claim by atheists that believers are by default violent fanatics and that religion is the cause of all wars.

Setting out to prove that religious faith is not inherently violent, she argues that the world's religions have throughout history allied themselves with states and empires for protection or to further their influence. Moreover, Armstrong suggests, the underlying reasons for war have little to do with religion but are social, economic and political. All very well, I suppose, but Armstrong's book hits the shelves at a time when the Middle East is in considerable turmoil; the actions of the Isis jihadists, in particular, and the general inflexibility of Hamas and the Zionists, would suggest that religion still has a lot to answer for.

But, writing in The Literary Review, critic Peter Marshall noted that Armstrong was au fait with sociological research suggesting that modern Islamist terrorists usually have a shallow understanding of their faith and are "often rootless youths driven by a range of personal and psychological motivations".

Marshall praised Fields of Blood as "a powerful and important work of scholarship, synthesis and argument" and, although it offered no easy solutions, the book laid out the complexities of the issues involved without obfuscation.

"Armstrong does not quite acquit religion of all the charges that have been made against it," he wrote. "But fair-minded readers will come away persuaded that it is fundamentally wrong-headed to regard religion as possessing an essential and unchanging character, inclining adherents to a particular course of action, and equally wrong-headed to see an ideology of secularism as a panacea for the world's troubles."

The bottom line

"Long shadows of deep lilac undulate over the hummocky ground. The heads of the marching soldiers, straining forward in mute resolution, are bathed in cadmium orange, the plasticity of their forms sharply etched by the purple shadows of their eye sockets. In their eyes, staring blankly ahead, is reflected the fire of the rising sun. They glare at life." - The Burning of the World: A Memoir of 1914, by Bela Zombory-Moldovan (New York Review of Books).