One of the best things about summer is that everybody goes on holiday. This is something that I do not like to do, and do my best not to. When at my most embittered I will tell you that travelling is expensive, irritating, time-consuming, boring, overrated and very often ethically compromised as well. Getting on an airplane is pretty much tantamount to shooting the environment in the face. Instead, I like to read. It is at once cheaper, more available and more pleasurable to travel by text—especially to places which do not otherwise exist. Precisely because everybody is away, I have more time to do this. I can also do it in bed. At my most self-indulgent I will take six or seven books to bed simultaneously, which I will pick up and drop, then pick up again in a random whirligig of attentiveness. Because I also still have lots of work to do, however, some of these books are things I have to review or I’m rereading for one reason or another. These will commingle promiscuously with various books I’ve been given for Christmas, borrowed on the basis of friends’ recommendations, or otherwise acquired. And because so much stuff is now online, I’ll have my iPhone in bed with me too, scrolling through the tiny flickering words before discarding it for a real book. I really don’t care whether what I read is poetry, philosophy, fictional or factual prose, whatever. In a word, it’s a mess. It can be quite disturbing to wake up with so many books strewn across the bed, contorted in different postures of incompletion, some bent back on their own spines, others coughing out improvised bookmarks, yet others smugly and tightly closed upon themselves.

This hazardous bed-bound reading carousel can sometimes come a cropper due to the claims of the book itself. One of the tracts I was revisiting this summer was Benedict de Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, in the Cambridge edition of Jonathan Israel. First published anonymously in Amsterdam in 1669—with the fake date and place of publication of ‘Hamburg, 1670’—the TPT is one of the most offensive books in the entire history of Bible criticism. Taking up the challenge of the new sciences, and notably the work of Rene Descartes, Spinoza attends to the text of both Old and New Testaments with an absolutely unprecedented eye for detail. In doing so, he not only offers propositions about religion that remain provocative even today for jaded post-religionists of every stripe, but creates an entirely new method of criticism. The book begins with the utterly contemporary recognition that: