Alister Chapman's crisply written and scrupulously impartial study captures the delicately managed contradictions that characterised the life and work of John Stott, whose Evangelical career started with fundamentalist tracts smuggled into Rugby School ‘in brown paper’ (p. 15), and ended with a vast ministry in five continents and the status of an Evangelical pope. Stott was an urbane controversialist who combined clarity of vision and firmness of purpose with a political temperament that knew how to compromise and seemed to know when to walk away. As Stott rose from campus evangelist to Victorian-style pulpit prince at All Souls Langham Place, to intellectual guardian of English-speaking Evangelicalism in the 1960s and '70 s, the recurring image is not of an explosive orator but of a shrewd communicator and negotiator, working late into the night at myriad conferences to draft statements of Evangelical vision and unity. He was more successful with the former than the latter. A vignette of his career is Stott's private account of sitting down to write a piece on the ordination of women in 1995 and feeling that both the arch-conservatives and ‘liberal feminists’ were peering over his shoulder (p.124) – a haunting but all-too-telling image of the elder statesman sensing the chimera of unity. Stott was the key figure in the post-war emergence of Evangelicalism from a nay-saying and sourly world-denying conservatism to a major presence in the Church of England and a significant social and political presence in modern Britain. He did more than anyone to unite the proclamatory and world-restoring strands of Evangelical ‘mission’. Yet Stott knew the limitations of his achievements and one senses that his attitude to the permissive society and to an ecclesial culture fatally divided in its responses to it was oddly similar: contend with it, and then move on. From the mid-'70s Stott turned his attention to ‘the Third World’. Again we see the evangelist as negotiator, the theologian as planner. A highlight of the book is Chapman's account of Stott's efforts to persuade American Evangelicals, in the wake of the Lausanne Conference on World Evangelization of 1974, to soften their aversion to social action. At the follow-up meeting in Mexico City, Billy Graham attempted to row back from that commitment and Stott decided to confront him, threatening to resign from the committee if Graham's vision of pared-down evangelism prevailed. Stott won the battle but the incident raised awkward questions about the role of pride, personal power and ambition in Christian ministry. While there is something sobering about the waves of confrontation that attended Stott's career at every stage – from defying his father to pursue ordination, to defending his university ministry from rank charges of ‘fundamentalism’, to wearying set-pieces within Evangelical Anglican ranks – the story is highly illuminating of the ‘fluid’ dynamics of Evangelical leadership. And the contrast between Stott's struggles to command a British audience in the 1960s and his surging influence overseas provides a sharp insight into the profundity of cultural change in the West and the extent of Christianity's migration ‘South’ as a world religion. The book may have benefited from more engagement with the charismatic and Pentecostal currents that have been most associated with this shift, and with which Stott was in little agreement. Godly ambition is a perceptive study whose importance will increase as scholars continue to map the complex relationships between ‘Western’ and ‘Global’ Christianity that John Stott, the ascetical jetsetter, did much to build.