This readable, tolerant and intelligent biography of the man who launched the Protestant Reformation in 1517 shows how much the Catholic church that Luther challenged 500 years ago is changing. The author, a leading British Catholic, does not seek to damn or even refute the dissident his church would once have happily consigned to a heretic’s fiery death. Instead, in a book that is remarkably sympathetic to its subject, Peter Stanford seeks to absorb Luther back into the broad mainstream of Christian thought, emphasising the continuities, rather than the conflicts, between Luther and Rome. Stanford humanises the “little monk” once seen as either Satan or a saint, showing him as a man with a full flush of flaws and faults, but whose moral courage in standing almost alone against clerical abuse and corruption changed the course of history and altered the shape of western civilisation itself.

• Martin Luther: Catholic Dissident by Peter Stanford is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£20). To order a copy for £17 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99