Three distinct schools of writing have emerged from the era of terrorism. The first tackles Islamist fundamentalism. The second claims that all fundamentalisms are the same. The third – which Victoria Clark embraces – supposes that it is monotheistic fundamentalisms other than Islamism which are cause for most concern.

Allies for Armageddon is Clark’s attempt to explain the historical nature and contemporary ‘influence’ of Christian Zionism. The first half of the book provides an occasionally interesting and sometimes amusing history of lonely crackpots and dissatisfied end-timers in Britain and America over some three centuries. For around a hundred pages, these misfits are written about with knowledge.

But history is not, apparently, what Clark has set out to write. As we learn from her introduction (a thirty-page travelogue of a tour to the Holy Land with a quack called Chuck Missler), what Clark is really engaging in is polemic. The history part contains barely enough for half