The hinge of the world

Richard Goodwin has been admired as a policymaker, political commentator, essayist, outspoken lawyer, writer of controversial books - and now as a dramatist. His subject is one that lies at the heart of everything we call modern: the epic struggle between the great Tuscan scientist Galileo and his arch-opponent, Pope Urban VIII - once a companionable fellow-philosopher, now the prince of a church threatened by Galileo's new natural science.

Goodwin has discerned the points of human tension in the spiritual and philosophical drama that Galileo and the Pope embody. In a richly detailed, vividly plotted play that truly "reads like a novel," we see how powerful, sometimes tragic forces shaped their dispute, forces that would doom Galileo's life yet redeem his ideas, that vindicated Pope Urban's authority in the short term but weakened it in the end.