Any book which begins its first sentence: "In November 2007 I heard that I had won a prize" and goes on to detail the award of $100,000 to fulfil the American donors' aspiration for a better world is liable to induce a certain unworthy queasiness in even the most charitable of readers. Nevertheless, it would perhaps take a heart of stone for a reviewer in such circumstances not to echo Dorothy Parker's famous review of The House at Pooh Corner: "Tonstant Weader Fwowed Up."

But one must beat down such jealous thoughts for the author is Karen Armstrong, a former nun, who is one of the gentlest, as well as best-known and bestselling, religious apologists and historian of world religions; and the theme of her latest book is, after all, compassion. It is accordingly a bold move on her part to start her book in this way (although it brings to mind Lord Longford quizzing a bookshop about why it was not displaying his book on humility more prominently).

Armstrong's purpose in Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life is to draw out the better angels of our nature and, more precisely, the better, common impulses of all the world's great religions towards fellow feeling and mutual tolerance. To that end, she devoted her prize from an American philanthropic organisation called TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) to drawing up a charter for compassion and this book is the result.

Compassion, as we know, has not been notable among the world's most religious folk over the past few years, from the fundamentalist bigots of the US religious right to the stern authoritarians of Roman Catholicism, the fanatics of the Israeli settlements and the Islamist terrorists. It is Armstrong's thesis that compassion, one of the oldest wellsprings of humanity, has been pushed aside by primitive urges to impose ourselves on others. The four Fs: feeding, fighting, fleeing and what she terms reproduction, have driven out more humane considerations.

The golden rule  behave towards others how you would like them to behave towards you  was first defined by Confucius more than 2,500 years ago and has been subverted ever since. Thus fundamentalists choose selective readings of their religious books which pay little attention to loving their neighbours. Rather in the manner of the self-help books which fill the shelves of American airport book-stores and head its bestseller lists, Armstrong has come up with a 12-step programme to propagate compassion, involving the cultivation of impulses such as empathy and mindfulness.

Reassuringly, she adds: "Be patient with yourself . . . do not become irritated if you are distracted, or discouraged if you seem to make no progress. Do not feel guilty if you are unable to overcome your feelings of aversion. Practised over time, this meditation can make a compassionate groove in your mind.

"It should become part of your daily practice . . . it should be a relaxed, ruminative process. It need not  indeed should not  take hours of your time. But if practised faithfully it will help you develop two new tools: a capacity for inwardness and the ability to think of others in the same way as you think of yourself."

I for one intend to practise this the next time I am elbowed aside for the last seat on the 6.45 to Tonbridge. I shall smile beatifically at the businessman with his half-eaten Cornish pasty and can of Stella as he tucks in beside me. I shall think benign thoughts about the Lycra-clad cyclist who defiantly folds his arms and complains if any lesser mortal bumps into his bike as it fills the gangway.

And, as I do so, I think I shall wonder who, precisely, this book is aimed at, because if you have the compassion that should be instilled by religious teaching already, you won't need it  and, if you don't have it, you are unlikely to pick it up in the first place. I must not be churlish however  the book expounds a Beautiful and Worthy Thought and TED will undoubtedly think its $100,000 has been well spent.