Introducing his diverting account of attitudes towards the medieval in modern Britain, Michael Alexander is disarmingly frank. ‘I have read little secondary literature’, he writes (p. xv). Indeed, before he began writing, ‘What little I had read on medievalism was not very encouraging’ (p. xiv). The result is a book which ignores much recent research. There is no reference here to Rosemary Sweet's pioneering account of antiquarianism, or to Chris Brooks's exemplary study of the Gothic revival. Although J. Mordaunt Crook's groundbreaking history of architecture is mentioned, it is re-titled the Problem, rather than the Dilemma, of style (p. 162). Instead of an engagement with current scholarship, the reader is offered a witty introduction to the subject, illustrated with some arresting images and close textual analysis. This takes us from Chaucer's Sir Thopas, described by Alexander as ‘a Belgian J. Alfred Prufrock’ (p. 35), to the combination of ‘boarding school story’ and ‘kiddie Gothic’ found in Harry Potter (p. 267). What underpins the book is a real love of the medieval. True, some writing and much art is condemned; even the impact of medievalism on people's love lives is questioned. ‘The taking of Lancelot and Guinevere as role-models was an unhappy effect of the Medieval Revival’, it is noted, ‘similar to the effect which the reading of D. H. Lawrence had on university English departments in the mid-twentieth century’ (p. 174). None the less, this is a book by an enthusiast for enthusiasts. It will be enjoyed as such by many.