Inquisition: The Reign of Fear
By Toby Green
Macmillan £20, 458 pages
FT bookshop price: £16

Between 1478 and 1812, the Spanish Inquisition tried more than 100,000 people for heresy, and executed thousands of them. Revisionist historians have minimised its horror, but as Toby Green sets out in his thematic history, the Spanish Inquisition and its shorter-lived Portuguese cousin were “a significant force in four continents for more than three centuries”, operating in their homelands and in colonies from Brazil to Angola and the Philippines.