Book review: ‘Inventing the Enemy’ by Umberto Eco

Inventing the Enemy is a hugely enjoyable collection of erudite essays on largely unrelated topics. As Umberto Eco explains in the introduction, he would have preferred to have entitled the collection Occasional Writings, but heeded his publisher’s concerns that the book needed a less boring title.

With the exception of one essay of little interest to anyone who doesn’t speak Eco’s native Italian, this collection contains a fascinatingly eclectic mix of subject matter. I particularly enjoyed the essays on the relativism and the various types of ‘truth’, not least for Eco’s dry observation, “the fact is different people mean different things when they talk of relativism”. I also very much enjoyed the pieces on epiphanies; St Thomas Aquinas’s views on whether human embryos have souls; and former incorrect hypotheses concerning geography and astronomy.

An excellent collection of occasional writings.