This welcome book comprises the papers given on 5 March 2005 at the opening of the Dr Williams's Centre for Dissenting Studies. The editors, the centre's co-directors, place Priestley in the context of English Dissent, and Wykes contributes a sketch of Priestley's life and work which traces his pilgrimage from Calvinism to Unitarianism. In the concluding paper Jenny Graham pursues ‘Joseph Priestley in America’. The intervening papers are thematic in what we should nowadays regard as a disciplinary sense. W. H. Brock discusses the range and estimates the value of Priestley's scientific work; James Dybikowski's paper on Priestley as metaphysician and philosopher of religion is exemplary; as might be expected of Britain's leading Priestley scholar, Martin Fitzpatrick writes authoritatively on Priestley the political philosopher; G. M. Ditchfield illuminatingly and apparently effortlessly unravels the complexities of 1770s Latitudinarianism; and Alison Kennedy distinguishes Priestley the historian from Priestley the theologian as historian and biblical critic. If the papers of Brock, Dybikowski, Fitzpatrick and Ditchfield are outstanding, all the papers merit careful study. Useful reminders abound: Priestley's study of the Bible, not of Socinian writings, led him to Unitarianism; he ‘was never clear in his own mind what phlogiston was’ (p. 74); he held that ‘the truest interest of christianity is promoted no less by throwing down weak and rotten supports, than by supplying it with firm and good ones’ (p. 85); his differences with Richard Price over philosophical necessity and civil liberty in no way vitiated their friendship; and ‘It was in America that [Priestley] had the satisfaction of seeing his political ideals … put into practice’ (p. 230). There is general agreement among the contributors that Priestley's religious views informed all his multi-faceted writings, and this is confirmed by the numerous, generally brief, references to theology and doctrine of which the careful index enables the reader to keep track. Nevertheless the absence of a paper specifically on Priestley's theology, which would have given detailed consideration to his views on revelation, and on such neuralgic doctrines as Christology, original sin and election, as well as to his writings on the sacraments, church order, discipline and catechetics can only be regarded as a lost opportunity – especially given the last word in the book's title, and Wykes's recognition that Priestley's ‘work … as a theologian … proved to be his lasting contribution’ (p. 48). The editors hope that this collection will ‘re-establish [Priestley] as a major intellectual figure in Britain and America in the second half of the eighteenth century’ (p. ix). A controversialist of integrity with an unusually wide range of interests and a mixed intellectual legacy, certainly. But if in Joshua Toulmin's opinion, Priestley's ‘name will live, with unsullied glory as an ornament to his country’ (p. 174), let us be cautioned that ‘His forthright arguments and incautious words were such that some friends as well as many adversaries wished he would put his pen down’ (p. 114), and that the slightest whiff of hagiolatry would almost certainly cause Priestley to turn in his grave.