In this volume Alan Sell offers ‘soundings’ of British Reformed and Dissenting ministers and their theological institutions from the Toleration Act to the late twentieth century. From the impressive influence of Philip Doddridge and Caleb Ashworth over the Daventry Academy through to the establishment in 1903–4 of the first ‘free’ faculty of theology at the University of Manchester and the work of Geoffrey Nuttall, Sell impresses upon the reader the breadth and fearlessness that has marked Nonconformist theological life in England since 1689. The Scottish Reformed tradition is also explored in chapters on Scottish religious philosophy in the second half of the nineteenth century, John Oman (who spent the large part of his ministry in England), and N. H. G. Robinson (who succeeded Donald Baillie in the Chair of Systematic Theology at St Andrew's in 1967). Also included in this volume are Geoffrey Nuttall's personal reflections upon his ministry during the twentieth century. Nuttall was a Welsh Congregationalist historian of Puritanism and Dissent, but Sell follows his brief memoirs with an assessment of his theological, rather than historiographical, influence. According to Clyde Binfield, Nuttall thought that ‘Church history was a continuation of gospel history. It was an outworking of man's understanding of God. It was a theological enterprise’ (pp. 215–16). Sell expounds this statement with care through an examination of Nuttall's writings, and this chapter will be of particular interest to readers of this Journal who wish to understand the motivations and practice of ecclesiastical history in Britain in the late twentieth century. Almost all of the chapters have been published in some form as articles or chapters elsewhere, and as a compendium of ‘soundings’, the swift movement between contexts – historical and institutional – can be disorientating for the reader. None the less, this does not ultimately detract from what is a valuable set of insights into the practice and theology of the dissenting and Reformed traditions in Britain in the modern period.