When, in her final speech as a Secularist, Annie Besant described her commitment to ‘Truth’, she borrowed the words of the prophet Job to express her devotion to the concept: ‘though she slay me, yet will I trust her’. There is an obvious irony in a freethinker like Besant resorting so instinctively, and as frequently as she apparently did, to the words of Scripture; yet for Timothy Larsen this reflects the wider orientation of Victorian culture towards the Bible. The argument that the Victorians were a ‘people of one book’ is not a groundbreaking thesis; however, in this excellent study the author succeeds in displaying the sheer variety of ways in which the Bible permeated Victorian life and thought. His chosen methodology is to provide case studies of ‘representative’ figures from a wide range of religious and sceptical traditions, and the results are hugely rewarding. Here we find, for example: an aspect of E. B. Pusey's career largely overlooked by scholars – his life's work on biblical commentaries; the atheist Charles Bradlaugh who chose to learn Hebrew to assist his Old Testament criticism; a T. H. Huxley who denounced his ideological enemies using the biblical language of idolatry; and Grace Aguilar, who wrote widely in defence of Judaism for a Jewish readership and frequently echoed the language of the New Testament in her work. The uniqueness of Larsen's book is its engagement with the diversity of Victorian thought; a weakness, perhaps, is the author's seeming hesitation to draw out, at least more substantially, broader themes. However, Larsen does argue convincingly that the evidence in his case studies suggests that that the resilience of ‘traditional’ approaches to Scripture has been obscured by a scholarly preoccupation with the Victorians and biblical criticism. The readers of this book will identify their own commonalities in the uses of the Bible across a variety of traditions, and Larsen has given us a rich work which shows how Victorian culture and society was characterised by its ‘sustained engagement with this singular text’.