DAMN!

Railing against Graham Greene’s tendency to glamorize evil in the New Yorker in 1948, George Orwell wrote that Greene “appears to share the idea, which has been floating around ever since Baudelaire, that there is something rather distingué in being damned”. Trying to persuade people otherwise is a thankless task. As anybody who has seen the recent Meryl Streep movie The Devil Wears Prada knows, Satan is back in vogue.

It is unsurprising, then, that some of the Devil’s sparkle has rubbed off in Western universities. The past two decades have witnessed an efflorescence of academic studies in witchcraft, demonology and the occult. Perhaps the volume of works about the Devil is appropriate: when Jesus met a man possessed by an evil spirit and asked the demon to reveal itself, it replied, “My name is Legion: for we are many”.

In Satan: A biography, the American scholar and former Jesuit Henry Ansgar Kelly talks of “the unjustifiably bad press given to Satan over the centuries”. This is not a new idea – more than a hundred years ago, Samuel Butler jotted in his notebook, “An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard only one side of the case; God has written all the books”. But Kelly’s use of the word “unjustifiably” betrays his innate sympathy for his subject: he is of the Devil’s party. In this succinct study, he adopts the role of Satan’s unofficial spin doctor. The result is entertaining as well as rigorous.

From this week's TLS.