God: A Biography, by Jack Miles (Simon & Schuster, £7.99 in UK)

"God," says the blurb, "is probably the greatest literary character in the West." Assuming that the Christian or Judaeo-Christian God is meant, he already has an adequate biography in the Bible, on which much or most of this work is based anyway. The author, an American and a former Jesuit, is learned in Near Eastern languages, which enables him to decode areas of the Old Testament which have been lost or travestied in translation. In some ways, the book is really a religious history of the Jews and their persecution under successive empires, a fate which - to state the obvious - has largely determined their history and mentality.