With French statesman Tallyrand serving as the book's master of ceremonies, Calasso persuades us to see our civilization in an entirely new light.

    He is simply seeking knowledge; 'it is only after you have come to know the surface of things that you can venture to seek what is underneath'. Whether contemplating a fine cheese, a hungry gecko, a woman sunbathing topless or a flight of migrant starlings, Mr Palomar's observations render the world afresh.

    To Lisa Veta, Cesar remained as much of an enigma after two years of their nomadic exile together as he had that first day in Clapham when he took up his peculiar vigial in her mother's kitchen and showed no signs of shifting out of her life, ever.

    Yet according to Redondi, an Italian historian, the astronomer's downfall was set in motion a full year earlier when the Jesuits denounced him for spreading the notion that atoms are the building blocks of matter. Both the Jesuits and the Catholic Church feared mechanistic physics as a threat to Eucharistic dogma, the belief that a wafer could be transformed into the body of Christ. Drawing on recently discovered documents in the Vatican archives, Redondi presents a startling reevaluation of this historic trial. He portrays it as a cover-up for charges of heresy stemming from Galileo's atomism. The Machiavellian doings of Pope Urban VIII and Cardinal Bellarmino, a fresco by Raphael and anonymous denunciations are pieces in a puzzle welded together in Redondi's meticulous, scholarly narrative. This study has generated controversy since its original publication in Italy, then France.

    This richly illustrated study of the sack as a cultural and artistic phenomenon reveals the ambiguities of preceding events and the traumatic contrast between the flourishing world of art under Clement VII and the city as it existed after the troops of Emperor Charles V had looted Rome in 1527.