Trevor Beeson's previous publications on the bishops and the deans of the Church of England have the advantage of drawing on a smaller field. The primary difficulty with this collection of short biographical essays is the absence of any coherent types into which the varied characters might be sorted. Here he struggles, from the formal titular descriptor vice chancellor (Arthur Mason), to the personal description of Emmanuel Amand de Mendieta as the ‘Belgian monk’, via such plausible canonical archetypes as parish priest and social reformer, respectively Peter Green and Samuel Barnett, raising the question whether these men can in any way be understood as representative of period or ecclesiology, or if they merely represent a companionable personal pantheon. The twenty short studies range across the nineteenth- and twentieth centuries, and from the much discussed (E. B. Pusey and Sydney Smith) to the relatively obscure (James Wilson, John Shirley), but within his opening and concluding remarks, Beeson provides only cursory elucidation of his selections, or, indeed, for the contribution of this particularly miscellaneous category of middle-ranking clergy. If the volume is an apologia for the varieties of eccentricity that can find a home under the shadow of the English cathedrals, it serves well, though a more comprehensive bibliography would be helpful. Beeson's concise and entertaining portraits produce another volume of that distinctly Anglican contribution to the nexus of confessional biography and hagiography, the brief and affectionate anecdotal life.