Cullen Murphy

Cullen Murphy talks about his book "Cartoon County: My Father and His Friends in the Golden Age of Make-Believe."

We think of the Inquisition as a holy war fought in the Middle Ages, but Cullen Murphy, Vanity Fair editor at large, shows that not only did its offices survive into the 20th century, in the modern world its spirit is more influential than ever. He traces the Inquisition and its legacy in  God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World, traveling from freshly opened Vatican archives to the detention camps of Guantánamo to the filing cabinets of the Third Reich, and he shows that the Inquisition pioneered surveillance and censorship and “scientific” interrogation.

Cullen Murphy, editor at large at Vanity Fair, former managing editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and author of Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), compares the Roman empire to the United States.

Are We Rome? is available for ...