**A New York Times Notable Book A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

**A New York Times Notable Book A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

Named a Book of the Year by the * Telegraph,the Spectator,the Observer,and BBC History Magazine***In Harran, the locals refused to convert. They were dismembered, their limbs hung along the town's main street. In Alexandria, zealots pulled the elderly philosopher-mathematician Hypatia from her chariot and flayed her to death with shards of broken pottery. Not long before, their fellow Christians had invaded the city's greatest temple, smashing its world-famous statues and destroying all that was left of Alexandria's Great Library.

Today we refer to Christianity's conquest of the West as a "triumph." But this victory entailed an orgy of destruction in which Jesus's followers attacked and suppressed classical culture, helping to pitch Western civilization into a thousand-year-long decline. In * The Darkening Age,Catherine Nixey brilliantly resurrects this lost history, offering a wrenching account of the rise of Christianity and its terrible cost."A feast of tales of murder, vandalism and] willful destruction . . . Nixey has a great story to tell, and she tells it exceptionally well." -- * Guardian" A] bold, dazzling and provocative book." -- Peter Frankopan, best-selling author of * The Silk Roads*