This handsome volume edited and partly written by Jeremy Catto (than whose no safer hands could be imagined), covers the history of Oriel and its component foster child St Mary's Hall from foundation to 2013. All essential bases are covered in ample, but never exhausting, detail. For readers of this Journal the chapters to which they will first have recourse are probably those of Peter Nockles on ‘Oriel and religion, 1800–1833’, and ‘A house divided: Oriel in the era of the Oxford Movement, 1833–1860’, and of Simon Skinner on ‘Oriel to Oliver Twist: Noetics and Tractarians at large’, where developments, inevitably reflecting or rebounding from John Henry Newman, are dealt with with satisfying subtlety and there proves to be more than previously said.. They will also home in on Jeremy Catto's chapter on ‘Patrons and pastors, 1385–1479’, Kenneth Fincham's on ‘A Protestant college, 1574–1660’ and Paul Seaward's on ‘An Anglican foundation’, dealing chiefly with the eighteenth century, and they will be well rewarded. It is to be hoped, however, that they will not stop there. The academic dominance of Oriel under Provosts Eveleigh and Copleston in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, admirably depicted by Ernest Nicholson, and Jeremy Catto's chapters elegantly placing Oriel in the history of the university at large are extremely useful, not least to those labouring in the vineyards of college and university history. If there is a weak spot in this volume it is in the section dealing with the buildings. Matthew Bool's text is very good but it is woefully unsupported by appropriate plans: it is small comfort to a non-Orielensis (and surely Orielenses are not the only intended readers) to learn that some vanished feature is approximately where Staircase X now stands. The subtitle ‘a history’ seems to imply scope for competitors but it is hard to envisage another on such a scale in the next half century, and even then it will be a hard act to beat.