One of the things one looks forward to when opening a John Cornwell book on the latest civil war battle in the church or a new papal portrait (he’s written four) is the intimacy of his first-hand reporter-turned-academic style. One can almost smell the plate of double-egged fettuccine, washed down with a second bottle of Antinori Chianti as he gossips with his high-ranking Vatican sources in a Roman trattoria. But not in this engaging book, where he shadows the first seven years of Francis’s papacy like a canon lawyer, guarding his subject and skilfully defending his reputation at every turn. The normal baroque feast of journalistic details and years of dogged scholastic research is not what the reader is served up in this fascinating, heartfelt and often deeply personal account of Pope Francis and his revolutionary papal regime. Francis is likened to a “disruptive innovator” CEO coming in and shaking up a complacent, insular, institutionalised, self-preserving work culture in favour o...