In his memoirs, the novelist Kingsley Amis recalls a visit in 1962 to the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge, with the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who had come to read his poems at the Cambridge Union. Gazing around the building’s splendid interior, Yevtushenko, with whom Amis had until that point communicated via an interpreter, suddenly spoke to him directly:

‘You atheist?’ he asked me in English.

‘Well yes, but it’s more that I hate him.’ …

‘Me,’ he said, pointing to himself, then gesturing more vaguely towards the roof, the other people there, the Rubens, but also seeming to include the being I had just mentioned; ‘me … means nothing.’ 

This moment captures some of the issues at stake in modern debates surrounding atheism. Amis wryly admits to the charge often levelled at particularly fervent non-believers that the vehemence and passion of their certainty amount to a kind of inverted, resentful faith. For Yevtushenko, by contrast, atheism seems more like a coolly sincere absence of feeling, but one that, if less self-contradictory than Amis’s, is also less attuned to the world: his vague gesture of disbelief applies not only to God, but also, it seems, encompasses the vaulted ceiling of the chapel itself and even ‘the other people there’.

The 17th-century Dutch philosopher Benedict or Baruch Spinoza has played a long-standing but shifting set of roles in debates around the nature, limits and implications of atheism, as Steven Nadler’s impressive new book shows. Spinoza perplexed and often terrified his contemporaries because, after the issue of the herem or ban