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God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World - by Cullen Murphy, 1st Ed. January 2012

https://www.cullenmurphy.me/other-books/godsjury

from the publisher:

The Inquisition conducted its last execution in 1826 — the victim was a Spanish schoolmaster convicted of heresy. But as Cullen Murphy shows in this provocative new work, not only did its offices survive into the twentieth century, in the modern world its spirit is more influential than ever.

God’s Jury encompasses the diverse stories of the Knights Templar, Torquemada, Galileo, and Graham Greene. Established by the Catholic Church in 1231, the Inquisition continued in one form or another for almost seven hundred years. Though associated with the persecution of heretics and Jews — and with burning at the stake — its targets were more numerous and its techniques more ambitious. The Inquisition pioneered surveillance and censorship and “scientific” interrogation. As time went on, its methods and mindset spread far beyond the Church to become tools of secular persecution. Traveling from freshly opened Vatican archives to the detention camps of Guantánamo to the filing cabinets of the Third Reich, Murphy traces the Inquisition and its legacy.

With the combination of vivid immediacy and learned analysis that characterized his acclaimed Are We Rome?, Murphy puts a human face on a familiar but little-known piece of our past, and argues that only by understanding the Inquisition can we hope to explain the making of the present.

A review of Cullen Murphy's book from Homiletic and Pastoral Review, for what it's worth:

In sum, what is Murphy’s methodological failure? One can compare institutions horizontally, such as the Spanish Inquisition, and others of the same era — the French monarchy and the English monarchy. If the Jews were expelled from Spain, and the Huguenots were exiled from France, so were the Anabaptists expelled from Lutheran Germany. We can compare those events, let us say, hypothetically. But vertically, or in a linear time-line, one cannot, in academic history, perform facile tricks, such as comparing the NKVD, or the Stasi, or the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with the Spanish Inquisition. It is tendentious. In another work, Murphy asks “Are We Romans?” Perhaps, that has the same methodological flaw. We just cannot ask “Are We God’s Jury?” or “Are We Inquisitors?”