Last confession. Morris West. 2000.

Giordano Bruno, Dominican monk and rationalist philosopher, was burnt at the stake in Rome’s Campo dei Fiori on 17:February 1600. Bruno’s beliefs and writings were considered heretical by the Catholic Church. Investigated and tortured by the Holy Office of the Inquisition, and incarcerated for seven years in Rome’s worst prison, Bruno was given the opportunity to recant but chosen instead to die for his beliefs.

Racked with doubt and despair, waking each day to the knowledge that he is one step closer to death. Bruno undertakes to leave some record of his existence. Not a chronicle of his life, nor a defence of the opinions which have tbrought him to this end, but a mosaic of anecdote, allusion and scraps and shards of memory which together create a sense of what West called ‘ the real Bruno within the man’s skin’,