Roger Rosewell's book is the first monographic survey of English wall painting to be published since Ernest Tristram's three volumes covering the subject from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries (1944–55). Its text does not replace or even substantially supplement what Tristram wrote. By the author's own admission (p. 5), the work is popular, and assumes an enthusiastic rather than informed readership. Standard scholarly questions and issues, such as the development of style and its role in iconography, the relationship between wall painting and painting in other media (glass, manuscript, panel), and wall painting's functional and semantic associations with sculpture and embroidery, are either not investigated or dealt with very briefly. Instead, the book presents a series of straightforward chapters on chronology, iconography, artisanship and techniques, function and ideology, and concludes with a gazetteer, subject-guide and bibliography. The latter, clearly assembled with more scholarly ambition, is deficient in some important respects: it lacks, for example, Miriam Gill's Courtauld Institute PhD thesis of 2001, the single most comprehensive work since Tristram's volumes, and Paul Binski and David Park's important 1986 article on the ‘Ducciesque’ wall-paintings of Prior Crauden's chapel at Ely. On the whole, however, it is well-informed, and provides a good base on which a budding researcher could build. That such a wide-ranging text contains few errors is a tribute to the assiduity and care of its author. Where mistakes do crop up, for example in the dating of the monumental Crucifixion with St Anne and the Virgin Mary in the surviving range of Coventry charterhouse (dated c. 1417, but more likely to have been executed c. 1430), it is because the available secondary literature is wrong. On a more positive note, some of the things that interest Rosewell, such as the representation and function of fictive drapery, masonry and micro-architecture, have been insufficiently studied to date, and present very fertile ground for future academic research. But the book's overriding virtue, and the thing which will make it indispensable to historians of medieval art, is its images. There are 242 of these, all in colour: the Boydell Press is to be congratulated for reproducing them so faithfully. In most cases they are the best published reproductions of the subjects they represent. Rosewell, whether as photographer or adviser, has a commendable eye for interesting detail, and the policy of inclusion reflects excellent judgement. The images of important paintings at Ewelme, Exeter, Winchelsea, Stratford-upon-Avon and numerous other places are clear and useful. Sometimes enthusiasm gets the better of coherence: most egregiously, the Brent Eleigh Crucifixion gets a double-page spread (pp. 278–9) without any regard for its symmetry (the Cross and Christ are thus lost in the gutter), and detail of the scene of Becket's martyrdom at South Newington (pp. 250–1) fares little better. On the whole, however, scholars of medieval art must be grateful for such an accessible survey of a widely dispersed object domain.