This book claims to be different from any previous book on Pius xii, partly because of the nature of its sources and partly because of its central argument: that Eugenio Pacelli's silence on the Holocaust was an inevitable consequence of his beliefs, philosophy and strategy. This strategy (‘Great Design’ – the Church as the all-powerful authority in the religious world) placed the interests of the Catholic Church above all else since ‘its weakening or demise would be the greatest possible disaster for the world’ (p. 197), and Pacelli feared that a resolute stand against Hitler would lead to savage reprisals which would compromise those interests. Indeed, the author argues that to ask why Pacelli was silent about the Holocaust is to pose the wrong question: ‘A better question may be to ask why Pacelli remained silent on virtually every atrocity throughout the 1930s and 1940s’ (p. 200). This position, of course, was able to justify the silent condoning of other dubious practices, such as the financial dealings of the Vatican and the alleged Mafia links with some of the clergy in Sicily. To advance his argument, the author goes in search of Pacelli the man (and Pius the pope), so that readers will not find a detailed account of the political strategic aspects of Pacelli's papacy (they are, of course, available in other texts), although there is sufficient here for the beginner to understand what a poor strategist Pacelli was. The author pursues his quest through an abundance of personal sources (listed at the end of the book) and a closer integration into the story of the role of the pope's lifelong companion and housekeeper, Sister Pasqualina. It makes for a good read, and is certainly a book that will appeal to non-academic as well as academic readers. The difficulty with the personal sources, however, is that they are never listed in the course of the book, so one has little or no idea exactly where they have exerted influence over the author's judgement and why. As a consequence, the actually referenced sources of the book appear a bit thin. The author expressly acknowledges his debt to John Cornwell's Hitler's pope: the secret history of Pius XII (London 1999), and Paul Murphy's biography of Pasqualina, The popessa (New York 1983), and this is hardly surprising since the book is quite heavily derivative in this sense, the footnotes of some chapters being almost entirely from these sources. However, the author is at pains to develop his own argument about Pacelli based on bringing together aspects of these diverse accounts with the reflections evidently provided to him by his personal sources. Overall, the picture of Pacelli is a compelling one, and a picture that changes over time, the pope becoming increasingly reclusive, hallucinatory and obsessive about his proximity to God. Pacelli, the author concludes, was not antisemitic; rather, ‘The real reasons why Pius, as Pope, could not escape from the momentum of papal – pro-Fascist – policy lay ultimately within himself; in his character and in the beliefs that motivated his actions’ (p. 194). His perception of the importance of the strength of the Catholic Church and his own role in sustaining that strength was, paradoxically, his greatest weakness, allowing Hitler to use and outsmart him.