Denys Turner does a rather better job of covering his subject while bringing out his own particular perspective. Even though his book is not long, and is written in the relaxed manner of a rather self-satisfied lecturer (half the verbiage could easily be pruned), it tells the reader something about Aquinas's metaphysics, his theory of the soul and understanding, his views about freedom of the will, his arguments for the existence of God and his negative theology, his ideas about friendship and his theory of Christ and the Eucharist. Turner describes the book as a "portrait" and, while it is short on factual, biographical detail, it dwells more on Aquinas the man than most doctrinal or philosophical studies —and on Aquinas the saint. Turner finds this sanctity in his self-effacingness: Aquinas presents, with supreme clarity, a structure of thought from which he himself, as a personality, is entirely absent. Turner, however, wants to make a more sensational point, and he goes on to claim that Aquinas's supreme act of self-denial lay in his deciding to leave his Summa Theologica unfinished. The Summa is indeed unfinished, and it might possibly be that, in the last months of his life, Aquinas deliberately chose not to go on with it. The more probable and prosaic explanation is that he was simply unable to continue. Turner, again, seeks to shock by calling Aquinas a "materialist". He adds that he does not mean this label in its modern sense, but it would have been more accurate, but commonplace, to call him a   hylomorphist: someone who followed Aristotle in seeing the world as made from matter and form. Turner does indeed explain something of this theory, but he fails to make clear the common ground which Aquinas shared with most of his contemporaries, misleadingly suggesting that they were all Platonists of one sort or another. Moreover, Turner's philosophical defences of arguments and positions of Aquinas's that he claims have been unfairly attacked by recent scholars (for instance, the "Third Way" — the argument that God must exist because there could not be a universe consisting only of contingent things) are loose and easily rejected.

Both of these books would be more useful if they were straightforward, dull and reliable. It is a pity, too, that in trying to make these two long-dead figures live again for readers today, Hollingworth and Turner pay so little attention to the historical dimension of both their thinking and its influence. To understand their greatness properly, we need to recognise that they no longer loom over our culture as they did for so many      centuries.