There is an old Latin saying, sine diabolo nullus dominus, which means ” without the Devil, no God.” It seems entirely appropriate, then, that a year or so after being presented with a book entitled God: A Biography (by an American, Jack Miles), we should now get one called The Devil: A Biography (Holt, 302 pages, $ 27.50). But this new book, by a young Englishman named Peter Stanford, is not the only sustained attention Satan has received lately. In the past year or two alone, there have been at least five other books about him in English aimed at a general audience, and probably more than that in other languages. My impression, without having taken a careful count, is that God has not done nearly so well during the same period.

This, of course, is nothing new. Dante’s portrait of Hell has always been much more popular than the section of The Divine Comedy devoted to Paradise, and the same is true of John Milton’s Paradise Lost as compared with his Paradise Regained. And in Paradise Lost itself, the character of Satan is so much more vividly drawn than the character of God that William Blake could famously observe: “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of angels and God, and at liberty when of devils and hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.”