Well over thirty years ago, in a Festschrift for Canon Garrett Sweeney, the then Master of St Edmund's House, now St Edmund's College, Cambridge, the late Adrian Hastings drew attention to the extraordinary flowering of English Catholic intellectual life during the 1930s. He pointed in particular to the significance of Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton. Expanding on this, and rather in the manner of Maurice Cowling's Religion and public doctrine in England, which merits a passing mention, James Lothian examines Catholic political, economic and social theory in the first half of the twentieth century, the source of which, he convincingly demonstrates (but then no one is arguing), was the writings of Belloc and especially The servile state. Belloc's trenchantly expressed convictions made an enormous impact upon his coreligionists, and upon the surprisingly large numbers of those Lothian denominates as intellectuals who converted to Roman Catholicism during the period. In this intelligent and stylishly written volume Lothian studies the lives, writings and to some extent the wider influence of some of these men and a handful of women. It is an important book, and deserves to be read by anyone interested not just in the religious history of the period but in the social history of Britain. The problems with this volume arise not so much from its excellent content but from the structure which the author has imposed, that of ‘the Catholic intellectual community’. Quite a number of the luminaries mentioned by Hastings are absent from Lothian's account. This is unfortunate as it results in only a partial view of the English Catholic world. There is, for instance, no place for Radclyffe Hall, who converted in 1912. She is absent from these pages even though some of her views mirrored the less attractive aspects of Belloc's thought. There is scarcely any room for Graham Greene and little for the maverick E. I. Watkin who, as a philosopher, falls outside the author's compass. While I found it hard to think of as intellectuals a good many of those whom Lothian describes as such – Tom Burns, for example – the real problem arises with his artificial construct of a ‘community’. Some, such as those just mentioned, appear to have fallen outside it, and are therefore not discussed, despite their being as well known to other members of the ‘community’ as those who, in Lothian's perspective, fall within it. And because he concentrates so much on individuals, the book becomes a touch claustrophobic. His subjects, with the possible exception of Christopher Dawson, did not spend all their time with their noses stuck into books and newspapers but enjoyed a wider social life. They attended meetings, both religious (a remarkable number of organisations are listed in the Catholic directories for the period) and secular, at which the matters of the day were discussed. Barbara Ward, who did not emerge quite so suddenly on the Catholic scene as is portrayed here, lectured incessantly, sometimes to Catholic groups, more often to non-religious ones and was a member of a number of associations. To take just one example, with Rosalind Murray, author of The good pagan's failure and – at this time – Arnold Toynbee's wife, Ward attended meetings of the League of Nations Union whose secretary was the Catholic John Eppstein, private secretary to Lord Robert Cecil and author of a couple of books on the role of the Church in international affairs. Though Barbara Ward is meticulously studied, Murray and Eppstein do not merit a mention. Had Lothian named his book ‘The rise and fall of the influence of Hilaire Belloc’ there would have been few or none of these quibbles. It would have been a less portentous title perhaps, but one which more accurately reflected its theme.