A corpus of Nonconformist texts was conceived by the Association of Denominational Historical Societies and Cognate Libraries as long ago as 1993, and Alan Sell, the overall editor, and Ashgate are to be congratulated on bringing it to fruition (albeit at steep cover prices) after the enterprise stalled under previous publishers. Most of the research for the series was undertaken in the 1990s, although this volume does incorporate later scholarship. Thompson is one of the most distinguished living historians of Nonconformity, and, in many respects, this book on the years 1900–2000 is excellent, certainly fulfilling the series objective of providing ‘an appetiser and a stimulus to further quarrying’. The general and the section introductions, amounting to forty-three pages, embody masterly summaries and judicious interpretation of the heyday and subsequent decline of the Free Churches. Each document is further prefixed by a helpful few lines of context. The extracts are sensibly arranged, thematically under eight headings of church life, ecclesiology, worship, theology, politics, peace and war, social issues and church unity. There are 152 documents in all, from half a page to nine pages, the average length being greater than in Bebbington's companion nineteenth-century volume, which contains ninety-three extra sources in slightly fewer pages. While longer extracts are often more meaningful, they cannot have helped the task of editorial selection and explain some of the relative skews in the final choice. These are least evident in chronology, although the 1940s and 1980s are less well represented, and the 1960s and 1990s the best. Topically, most key themes are covered, but overseas missions are underplayed, and there is nothing on Free Church responses to non-Christian faiths and the New Age at end-century. Geographically, the volume spans England and Wales, but there are just three Welsh excerpts. Denominationally, 9 per cent of documents are ecumenical, 32 per cent are Methodist, 38 per cent Reformed (with an over-representation of the Presbyterian Church of England), 16 per cent Baptist and only 5 per cent from other organisations. On an inclusive definition of the Free Churches, readers will regret the absence of bodies such as the Apostolic Church, Assemblies of God, Christian Brethren, Church of the Nazarene, Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion, Elim Church, Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches, Free Church of England, Independent Methodist Churches, Moravian Church and the Wesleyan Reform Union. The extracts are drawn from published books, pamphlets and serials; there is but one manuscript. Much emphasis is placed on official records, and more attention to the grass-roots experience of Nonconformity, as reflected in autobiography, oral history, diaries, letters or literature, would have been beneficial. Such excursions as are made in this direction sometimes come from secondary rather than primary works. There are also few statistics. Some leading figures (for instance, Leslie Weatherhead) and several major surveys such as Rowland's The Free Churches and the people (1908) or Driver's A future for the Free Churches? (1962) are missing. On the whole, the collection feels less balanced than Thompson's edition of documents on Nonconformity in the nineteenth century (1972). As he concedes in his preface, ‘it would have been possible to compile an equally interesting book with a completely different set of texts’. The volume concludes with a bibliography (short and eclectic) and a name index.