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Represented By: Ivan Mulcahy
She was a television producer for BBC1’s moral documentary series Heart of the Matter presented by Joan Bakewell, Channel 4’s live open-ended chat show After Dark and was also a producer on Radio 4’s history series Leviathan.
As a regular reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle, Literary Review and Tablet, she specialises in works of popular history. She is the co-editor of two books: Great Spirits: The Fifty-Two Christians who Most Influenced their Millennium (ranging from Bach to Martin Luther King), published by Paulist Press in America and Continuum Books in the UK, and A Deep But Dazzling Darkness, an anthology from Anglo-Saxon to modern times of the experience of belief and disbelief, published by Darton Longman & Todd.
World rights to Selina O’Grady’s And Man Created God were sold in a two-book deal to Toby Mundy after a four publisher auction.
Represented By: Ivan Mulcahy
She was a television producer for BBC1’s moral documentary series Heart of the Matter presented by Joan Bakewell, Channel 4’s live open-ended chat show After Dark and was also a producer on Radio 4’s history series Leviathan.
As a regular reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle, Literary Review and Tablet, she specialises in works of popular history. She is the co-editor of two books: Great Spirits: The Fifty-Two Christians who Most Influenced their Millennium (ranging from Bach to Martin Luther King), published by Paulist Press in America and Continuum Books in the UK, and A Deep But Dazzling Darkness, an anthology from Anglo-Saxon to modern times of the experience of belief and disbelief, published by Darton Longman & Todd.
World rights to Selina O’Grady’s And Man Created God were sold in a two-book deal to Toby Mundy after a four publisher auction.
Author: Selina O’Grady
Genre: Subject-led Non-Fiction
She asks whether tolerance can be expected to heal today’s festering wound between these two worlds, or whether something deeper than tolerance is needed.
Told through contemporary chronicles, stories and poems, Selina O’Grady takes the reader through the intertwined histories of the Muslim, Christian and Jewish persecutors and persecuted. From Umar, the seventh century Islamic caliph who laid down the rules for the treatment of religious minorities in what was becoming the greatest empire the world has ever known, to Magna Carta John who seriously considered converting to Islam; and from al-Wahaabi, whose own brother thought he was illiterate and fanatical, but who created the religious-military alliance with the house of Saud that still survives today, to Europe’s bloody Thirty Years war that wearied Europe of murderous inter-Christian violence but probably killed God in the process.
This book is an essential guide to understanding Islam and the West today and the role of religion in the modern world.
“A wide-ranging study tests competing claims of tolerance in the world’s major religions.”
- JK Rowling“O’Grady’s work will fascinate anyone wishing to plunge into the histories of Western Christianity and Euro-proximate Islam.”
- Alice Burton“This perceptive, masterly history will change how many readers think about toleration and the supposed clash between Christian and Muslim worlds.”
- Publisher’s Weekly
Author: Selina O’Grady
Genre: Subject-led Non-Fiction
At the time of Jesus's birth, the world was in ferment. Across Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Asia - societies rife with gods and messiahs, priests and warriors - the old certainties of family, village and tribe were being overturned.
Religion was becoming the source of order and stability. And Man Created God takes the reader on a dazzling journey across the empires of the ancient world to reveal how emperors and kings manipulated religion to consolidate their power.
In Rome, Augustus was deified by his brilliant spin doctors; in what is now Sudan, the warrior queen Amanirenas exploited her godlike status to inspire her armies to face, and defeat, Rome; while in China, the usurper Wang Mang won and lost the throne over his obsession with Confucianism.
In this riveting account of the interplay of faith and power, Selina O'Grady answers the most urgent question of all: how did the tiny Jesus cult triumph over more popular religions - the goddess Isis, the miracle worker Apollonius, even the cult of Augustus - to become the world's dominant faith?