The Gadfly ★★★★☆

This is the body that was given for you⁠—look at it, torn and bleeding, throbbing still with the tortured life, quivering from the bitter death-agony; take it, Christians, and eat!

Came on my radar a couple of months ago when it was in the news as a book that Micheál Martin and Xi Jinping bonded over and sounded interesting. Compelling, tragic, quite racist in the middle, and ends with a fierce anti-Christian polemic that my inner ratheist is perhaps a tad too fond of. I particularly enjoyed Montanelli trying to pass on the choice of what is to be done to a condemned man to the man himself—as if it were a mercy—washing his hands of guilt and sin by refusing to face his own choice, and being told to fuck off and stop pretending that the hangman is the real victim of an execution.