This excellent series continues with a guide to one of the most complex and intriguing men of the early modern period. Logan's approach, in attempting the unenviable task of compiling a ‘comprehensive’ picture of More that retains both breadth and depth, is to present a ‘critical biography’ by editing twelve outstanding essays from leading scholars of the period (sans John Guy intriguingly) ranging from More's formation as a boy in London to his lasting legacy. The three sections of the book (‘Life, times and work’, ‘Five major works’ and ‘Reception’) begin with Barron's impressive survey of More's early life and the fulfilment of Cardinal Morton's prediction that he would become distinguished in public affairs, even when supposedly testing his vocation with the Carthusians. More was a great humanist, as both McConica and McCutcheon emphasise: through his education, friends and works, shot through with rhetorical wit, and his public life as a lawyer, scholar, ambassador, diplomat, orator and Lord Chancellor, examined by Curtis here, More maintained Platonic ideals for his own life and that of the monarchy. Even More's persecution of ‘heretics’, Rex argues, was more the work of a statesman than a fanatic. Marshall completes the first part of this Companion with a poignant portrayal of More's final years, from his resignation as Chancellor in 1532 to his death, nearly two years later. In part ii Baker-Smith reminds us that More's great(est) work, Utopia, is a work of fiction rather than philosophy, the role of which is to unsettle familiar attitudes rather than create a specific state of society. Logan tackles More's famous History of King Richard the Third, characterised by its multiple sources and its moral lessons for deceitful rulers. Furthermore, A dialogue concerning heresies, as Duffy observes, published at the zenith of More's career as he succeeded Wolsey as Lord Chancellor, is a treatise against the Reformation, written in his favourite literary form, commissioned by Cuthbert Tunstall who, in 1528, had urged More to write some popular works to counteract the ‘cunning malice’ of Lutheran heretics. The last two essays in this section, by Taylor and Rodgers, concern two of More's prison works, written during his fourteen-month incarceration in the Tower. A dialogue of comfort against tribulation, inspired by the 1526 defeat of the Hungarian army by Ottoman Turks, addresses the right response to religious persecution including More's own, and the unfinished De tristitia Christi, on Christ's agony in the garden of Gethsemane, reminds us of More's own Gethsemane of trial and imprisonment in the Tower. Part iii comprises a single essay by Prescott, which cleverly shifts from More's ‘nowhere’ (Utopia) to his presence now ‘everywhere’, through Foxe's portrayal of the villainous More to modern notions of dystopia. In a work of this size there are inevitable omissions (I would have appreciated a chapter on More's household ‘school’ and family), but nit-picking aside, this is essential reading for any who wish to know about this most ‘marvellous man’.