In 1999, Baigent and Leigh published "The Inquisition". Bernard Hamilton, writing in the "English Historical Review", described the book as pursuing "a very outdated and misleading account", which ignored all modern development in Inquisition Studies and grossly exaggerated its power and influence, to the extent of being polemical. Writing in the "Spectator" magazine, Piers Paul Read deemed the authors to have penned a misinformed diatribe against Catholicism, with nil interest in "understanding the subtleties and paradoxes in the history of the Inquisition". A review in The Independent noted it to be mostly drab and uncontroversial, in reiterating facts which were already known for decades but which progressively gave way to hysteria, in its bid to draw a parallel between the ancient institution and current abuse of power by Catholic authorities. Dongwoo Kim, writing in "Constellations", noted the book to not be a significant contribution in the field, in that it was an epitome of "Whig historiography" which sought for a binary categorization of the past between good and evil, while locating the Catholic Church as the "antithesis of modernity and liberalism".