Handsomely presented here with some beautiful plates are forty-one essays reprinted from journals, annuals and the like. The gleaning of Dassmann's grapes is, as you would expect, better than the vintage of all but the most advanced scholars. The editor divides it into five groups: ‘Church Fathers and theology’; ‘Spirituality and ethical formation’ (Lebensgestaltung); ‘Church and church historical study’; ‘Reception of Paul’; ‘Archaeology and early Christian art’; with an appended sixth essay which is personal and is in some ways the most interesting in the collection. The divisions, though, can only be loose: for example, artistic representations of St Paul (few and usually subordinating him to Peter and even Thecla) appear in group four. The essays vary in scope: some are detailed discussions of patristic biblical exegesis (for example Ezekiel's vision of the divine throne, or the soul of the Church in Canticles), or comparison of themes. Others range more widely: the origin of the concept of ‘person’, for example, and the ‘greatness’ of Pope Gregory. All keep the reader's attention and make their points often in unusual ways. He has good things to say on the nature and value of church history; on Harnack; on Modernism and the unfortunate Joseph Wittig. The essays on art and archaeology, including his assessment of the historical evidences for the life and death in Rome of St Peter, are of special value. A pleasure to read and instructive about church life in the quite recent past is his memoir of the years he spent in Rome as a postgraduate student from 1964 to 1966. Expert guidance in Rome on his field of archaeology was lacking and he had largely to make his own way. An essay on Joseph Wilpert (1857–1944) shows how far standards had slipped, though even Wilpert lacked the objective historian's eye. The presence in the college of distinguished visitors to the council whose third session opened in September 1964, and conversation with them, enlarged his limited appreciation of the Church and broadened his horizons. Dassmann's has been a long career into which his bishop threw him, as he relates, unexpectedly and by post. How sensible prelates could be in those days.