In his Bampton Lectures, delivered at Columbia University in 2007, which form the basis of this little book, Jonathan Riley-Smith set out to demonstrate how modern perceptions of the crusades differed from the medieval actuality. The first two chapters describe the nature of crusading as both holy and penitential, mainly from the ideological and emotional perspective of crusaders. Riley-Smith is eager to achieve what he regards as a neutral but valid empathy with medieval crusaders, even if he is forced to concede the flaw in his approach, in a throwaway aside on the significance of the cross in ‘the minds of crusaders (in so far as one can see into them)’. Indeed. There is much that will be familiar to students of Riley-Smith: the ex cathedra assessments of medieval mentalities and dismissal of alternative views; the sensitive reading of the theology behind crusade apologetics; the neat, almost schematic exposition of complex issues of religious motivation and attitudes to warfare; the stern rejection of materialist interpretations in favour of the centrality of sincere piety; the footnotes puffing his cohort of pupils. Some oversimplification distorts, as in the account of Amnon Linder's work of liturgy. However, the purpose is not simply to distil his account of crusading, but to explain the warped construction of the crusades in contemporary political and cultural polemic and conflict. The third section of the book traces the nineteenth-century development of what he describes as ‘paracrusading projects’ (notably and fascinatingly a hotch-potch of Hospitaller revivalism and mainly Roman Catholic evangelical pipe dreams, such as Cardinal Lavigerie's brief Armed Brothers of the Sahara of the 1890s) and ‘pseudocrusading language’, that seeped into public rhetoric from the era of French colonialism to the First World War. The fourth section anatomises the projection of the crusade by modern anti-western (‘us’, in Riley-Smith's tellingly honest formulation) Muslim critics. The subsequent discussion traces the growth of secular pan-Arabism and then of religious jihadism as a discourse of victimhood and resistance. This interpretation is firmly on the lines already laid down by Emmanuel Sivan, Elizabeth Siberry, Carole Hillenbrand and Riley-Smith himself, among others. The balance of book is peculiar. Ignoring attitudes to crusading between c.1500 and c.1800 is unsatisfactory. The detailed case studies of nineteenth-century crusade revivalists sit oddly with the hawk-like general synthesis elsewhere. While it is hard to agree that ‘Lavigerie was not some utopian fantasist’ (especially given the wonderful photograph of the Armed Brothers on the dust-jacket), the remark reveals a wider agenda that allows Riley-Smith to attack those who minimise the seriousness of religion and faith, both to individuals and as major elements in historical causation, even in the 1890s. His targets include early modern secular legal theorists who, discarding Augustine and Aquinas, elevated the interests of the state as a justification for war; Enlightenment thinkers; Protestant romantics; liberal economists; material reductionists; Steven Runicman; those who assume modern superiority or moral progress; any, in fact, who appear incapable of the level of empathy Riley-Smith regards as necessary to understand the medieval past for what it was not what we make of it. Read in this way, this small volume has an interest besides its stated broad ambition.