This book, by the editor and the Washington correspondent of the Economist, tells us "how the revival of religion is changing the world". Its message is a great deal more nuanced than its title and subtitle imply. In some parts of the world, God is back with a vengeance. In others, He never went away. There are undoubtedly places where He appears to be on his way out (Britain being one of them). Nevertheless, there is no arguing with Micklethwait and Wooldridge's central contention that the revival of religious ideology in the late 20th century has changed the world in ways that would have stunned and embarrassed the political scientists of 30 years ago. And it has also made the task of containing future international conflict infinitely more challenging: as the book points out, "three out of the four most likely flashpoints for nuclear conflict — Pakistan-India, Iran and Israel-Palestine — have a strong religious element.

God is Back: How the Global Rise of Faith is Changing the World
John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Allen Lane, 352 pp, £25

For 20 years, Kilcullen was an officer in the Australian SAS, with combat experience in East Timor and periods as a counter-insurgency adviser in Indonesia and southern Thailand. His speciality is lone insertion to acquire deep anthropological background on what he dubs hybrid conflicts. In these, what Kilcullen calls international Islamist "heretics" (takfiri) merge with "accidental guerrillas", engaged in essentially local conflicts, so as to provide the necessary cover from which to attack the West.

The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One
David Kilcullen
Hurst & Company, 344 pp, £20

War Since 1990
Jeremy Black
Social Affairs Unit, 176 pp, £10

War: A Short History
Jeremy Black
Continuum, 224 pp, £16.99

Both these books look comprehensively at global warming and cover much the same ground in much the same order. There the similarities end. First published last year, Lord Lawson's Appeal is the best short book on the entire range of issues in the global warming debate that is available from a British publisher. This paperback edition with a substantial new afterword is therefore most welcome. Lawson is lucid, thoughtful and fair-minded. The book's highly useful footnotes and bibliography attest to Lawson's familiarity with the wide range of scholarship on the many scientific disciplines that contribute to understanding the climate and with the major economic analyses of the energy-rationing policies proposed to deal with warming.

An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming
Nigel Lawson
Duckworth, 160 pp, £6.99

Blueprint for a Safer Planet: How to Manage Climate Change and Create a New Era of Progress and Prosperity
Nicholas Stern
Bodley Head, 256 pp, £16.99

We all know the road bore, who arrives at a lunch party and explains in detail exactly how he (it's always a he) got there, how the motorway was jammed solid, which shortcuts he took and how many minutes they saved him. Quite what he will make of Joe Moran's engaging cultural history of the British road is anybody's guess: definitions such as "it is a study in the living memory of roads" might leave him briefly baffled. Yet if he perseveres he will find himself engrossed by Moran's wide-ranging but succinct exploration of what roads have meant for Britain since the advent of the motor car.

On Roads: A Hidden History
Joe Moran
Profile, 288 pp, £14.99

The Reformation in England remains a source of stimulating controversy for modern British historians. Was it a good thing or a bad thing? Were the English people delighted to be rid of medieval superstition, dump the Pope and privatise the estates of lazy, corrupt monks — the Whig view of history? Or was Protestantism a bleak Germanic creed imposed upon Merrie Englanders by the ruthless agents of the Tudor state — the view of revisionist historians such as Professor Jack Scarisbrick (The Reformation and the English People) and Professor Eamon Duffy (The Stripping of the Altars and The Voices of Morebath)?

Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor
Eamon Duffy
Yale, 280 pp, £19.99

For Bruce Bawer, like Barry Goldwater, moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. Surrender is a passionate, fluent, compelling, arresting and troubling work with many virtues. And one great flaw. 

A polemic in defence of Enlightenment virtues, and in particular the indispensable US Constitution First Amendment liberty, freedom of speech, Surrender is written with a fierce urgency that compels attention. The manner in which freedom of speech has been relativised, circumscribed and betrayed in the face of extremism is powerfully documented. The specific challenge to democratic freedom posed by Islamist fundamentalism is presented with bracing clarity. But Bawer's call to arms in defence of freedom is, in this reviewer's eyes, tragically compromised by his failure properly to identify who the enemies of liberty truly are.

Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom
Bruce Bawer
Doubleday, 352 pp, £16.78

History tends to be taught in neatly packaged themes — the Crusades, Tudors and Stuarts, the Industrial Revolution, the Victorians, the rise of fascism, etc. In modern educationspeak, these are called "modules". Barnaby Rogerson defies the modular. For although his sweeping narrative has a distinct form, it is sinuous and multi-faceted and offers myriad delights. And it is written with immense flair.

The Last Crusaders: The Hundred-Year Battle for the Centre of the World
Barnaby Rogerson
Little, Brown, 512 pp, £20

You cannot be a Jack Reacher — a superbly fit, world-weary, immensely attractive, chivalrous, extremely observant six-foot five former military policeman in his forties, with an arsenal of abilities that make you the bane of all bullies and wrongdoers — because he is a fictional creation. However, you can spend time in his company — one of the great pleasures of contemporary thriller and mystery fiction since the 1995 publication of Killing Floor, the first of 13 books by Lee Child.

Gone Tomorrow
Lee Child
Bantam Press, 441 pp, £18.99

With this grippingly readable novel, Sarah Waters takes another step away from the sequence of successful books set in Victorian England (Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and Fingersmith), which made her name. Her last book, The Night Watch, was set in London during the Second World War. This one takes place in and around a country house in Warwickshire in the late 1940s, a time of great, and sometimes painful, social change. Once again Waters, a gifted writer whose great skill is to recreate a period tone without writing pastiche, has done careful research. This time, though, she has chosen to use a classic form of popular fiction, the ghost story. In plot and atmosphere she has plainly been influenced by masters of the genre, including Conan Doyle and M. R. James.

The Little Stranger
Sarah Waters
Virago, 512 pp, £16.99