By those who remember him at all, Geoffrey Fisher's name recalls an era of Anglicanism when dignitaries of the Church of England were occasionally selected from among the headmasters of public schools. It is not a practice evident today. Hence, to some extent, the explanation for Fisher's lowly place in the halls of ecclesiastical celebrity. He brought it on himself, especially in his lukewarm attitude towards his pupil at Repton and successor at Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, and his periodic lapses into school rhetoric. The authors of this new study of Fisher cite his closing instruction to the members of the Lambeth Conference of 1958 to ‘go back to their classrooms’. The remark was intended as humorous self-caricature, yet it has seemed to many to have summed up the man. As such it does Fisher and his achievements as archbishop, from 1945 to retirement in 1961, an injustice – as this book succeeds in showing. The study falls into three sections: personal background and the headmastership of Repton, his primacy of the Church of England, and the period of retirement until his death in 1972. The last third of the book reproduces documents selected to illustrate Fisher's leading pronouncements (speeches in the House of Lords, and so forth.) The balance of the study is about right, and the resulting assessment is generous, scholarly and readable; a valuable contribution to understanding of mid-twentieth century Anglicanism. The retirement section is part of the balance, for Fisher broke with custom in issuing, from his Dorset home, opinions on public affairs – in active opposition, for example, to the scheme for a reunion of Anglicans and Methodists which was eventually defeated in 1969. Archbishop Ramsey had endorsed it. In this book Chandler and Hein present their readers with a man who concentrated on Church order and discipline, a practical reformer of a Church certainly in need of it – his restructuring of canon law was his main achievement – and a man who did not have, and did not aspire to, intellectual insights. He was, in short, a nuts-and-bolts administrator, and a great one. But his limited intellectual capacities inhibited any very profound statements about the dangers to a religious understanding of human life of the sort proceeding from Rome in these Cold War years, of the threat from philosophical materialism. Similarly, he took a canon law view of moral questions, accepting, for example, some of the recommendations of the 1957 Wolfenden Report on homosexuality yet condemning aspects of homosexual behaviour as ‘a kind of freemasonry.’ It was a strange observation, since he was himself a Freemason, as were sixteen other English bishops at the time.