This is a sharply focused biographical history of the man who was arguably the founder of Pentecostalism in Britain. Alexander Boddy (1854–1930) was Anglican vicar for thirty-eight years in the industrial parish of Monkwearmouth, Sunderland. At his All Saints Church in September 1907 Pentecostal phenomena broke out during a visit by the Norwegian Methodist preacher and Pentecostal pioneer T. B. Barratt, whom Boddy had invited for a series of meetings. Boddy remained the acknowledged leader of the mainstream of British Pentecostalism at least until the end of the First World War. He presided over a succession of seven annual International Pentecostal Conventions at Sunderland until 1914. Boddy was also an international traveller, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and prolific writer. One of his lasting contributions to the history of Pentecostalism was his editorship of the Pentecostal periodical Confidence, published between 1908 and 1926. Wakefield clearly has unstinting admiration for Boddy and his leadership of the fledgling Pentecostal movement, including his ultimately unsuccessful efforts to contain it within existing Churches, his ecumenism, his conservative evangelical theology (tempered as it was by his Pentecostal experience) and his pastoral and missionary heart – the latter evidenced by his participation in the leadership of and his continued support for the Pentecostal Missionary Union, founded in Sunderland in January 1909. Based on original documents, especially from Boddy's writings in Confidence, Wakefield discusses Boddy's career from his upbringing as an Anglican priest's son in a working-class parish in Manchester, his participation in the Holiness Movement (particularly the Keswick Conventions), his travels to north Africa, Palestine, northern Europe and north America, his family life, Pentecostal experiences beginning in 1892 and culminating in his speaking in tongues in 1907, leadership of the new movement in Britain and continental Europe, and his formative and substantial contribution to Pentecostal theology. The book closes with the watershed events of the Great War and its effect on Pentecostalism and Boddy's diminishing role in the movement, as younger leaders came to the fore. Boddy remained a ‘Charismatic’ Anglican priest all his life, half a century before this became more fashionable in the ‘Charismatic Movement’. Although Wakefield might have benefited from wider reading in early Pentecostal history and theology, his book is the most comprehensive, readable and informative biography of this important figure in English ecclesiastical history; and he charts with accuracy and sympathy Boddy's significance both for Anglicanism and for Pentecostalism worldwide.