This is, Frank Turner immediately informs us, ‘a historian's edition of the work’ (p. vii). What he means is quickly apparent: this is not the Apologia of the apologists, of those who have carried Newman to the precipice of sainthood. Rather, this edition represents Turner's attempt to recover the Apologia as an historical source – a work of literary and even spiritual brilliance, to be sure, but as historically unreliable as any autobiography, an unreliability all too often ignored or obscured in the religiously charged world of Newman studies. Turner first made this argument in his John Henry Newman: the challenge to Evangelical religion (New Haven 2002), and the present work is in many ways a continuation and extension of that book. Even the six sermons included here were chosen to illumine arguments first advanced there. Those that took issue with that book will no doubt be enraged by the introduction to this edition, and it is hard to escape the impression that this was Turner's intent. The lengthy introduction is combative and provocative, and much more than a simple contextualisation of the edited text. Turner is convinced that an ‘enormous historical misunderstanding and ignorance have continued to enshroud both Newman's Anglican life and the character of the Tractarian movement’ (p. 4). This is partly the fault of hagiographically-inclined scholars, but also Newman's own doing. It is Turner's contention that the Apologia was not only conditioned by but designed for the time it was written, and is thus only biographically and historically useful for that period in Newman's life. For the 1830s and 1840s, it is not only inaccurate, but profoundly and deliberately disingenuous. Turner supports this argument with a close comparison of what the Newman of the Apologia says happened then, and what the Newman of history actually did. (‘The Newman of the Apologia and the Newman of history’ is the highly significant title of the introduction.) Thus Turner reads Newman's silence on his (to Turner) profound anti-Evangelicalism in the 1830s as a means of securing Protestant sympathy in 1864/5. This caution also accounts for the Apologia's full-bore assault on liberalism, which Newman portrays as his enduring enemy. What the Newman of history had meant by what the Newman of the Apologia called liberalism was in effect Evangelical Protestantism. By re-imagining it as liberalism in the Apologia, Newman could secure the support of all those out of sympathy with an increasingly secular age without being seen to make a sectarian point. But Evangelical Protestants were not Newman's only audience. By the early 1860s his position in the Roman Catholic Church was uncertain. He needed to secure space for his own brand of liberal Catholicism, and support for his planned Catholic college at Oxford. Turner notes, for example, that Newman's otherwise perplexing ‘Note A’ (on liberalism), had almost nothing to do with historical Tractarianism, but rather was ‘directly and intimately’ (p. 72) linked to the contemporary Syllabus of Errors. Turner's side-by-side quotations (p. 73) from the Apologia and the Syllabus are striking, as is his argument that Newman attacked liberalism in the Apologia so as to avoid being accused of it by his fellow Catholics. More provocative is Turner's account of what the historical Newman actually was, as opposed to what the Newman of the Apologia wished him to be. Newman, Turner argues, did not progress slowly and steadily towards Roman Catholicism, but rather was driven by passion, pique, accident, contingency and tumultuous followers who were less proto-Catholics than idiosyncratic inventors of ‘a religion of their own personally self-willed devising’ (p. 70). In other words, liberals as Newman would define the term in the Apologia. Moreover, had Newman's closest friends in the Littlemore community not converted it is ‘an open historical question’ (p. 102) whether Newman himself ever would have. This is strong stuff, but it is not necessary to accept every argument to recognise that Turner has produced an exceptionally fertile and thought-provoking interpretation of both John Henry Newman and his great work. It is tempting to say that it cannot be ignored by Newman scholars, but that is perhaps too optimistic. Better to say that it should not be ignored. As for the text, the editing is careful, the editorial interventions useful and unobtrusive, and the choice of the 1865 Longman edition (omitting the exchange with Kingsley) reasonable. Even those who threw the book across the room in a rage on reading the introduction will nevertheless have to use it for what it clearly is: the standard scholarly edition of a classic of Victorian literature.