This new book from a popular author on cultural issues attempts to accomplish two tasks within the same work. The first is to provide a lively and accessible history of Sunday observance, from the ancient world to the present, and with particular reference to America and Britain. This is accomplished mainly by providing case studies of the work and lives of specific personalities, from Augustine and Caesarius of Arles to George Herbert and Doctor Johnson, and setting them against contemporary legislation and convention. The focus is on points when the subject was contentious, in late antiquity and the early modern period, and the work is well and briskly done. About halfway through, however, the book turns into a different sort of enterprise, concerned with illustrating the complexity of Christian belief and practice in the modern English-speaking world. The focus is now more specifically on creative writers and intellectuals, Hannah More, Ruskin and Gosse in the British case and Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Wallace Stephens and Robert Lowell in the American. The theme of attitudes to Sunday is still present, but intermittent, and as part of the much broader remit of examining the nature of modern Christianity, at least among poets and theorists of aesthetics and nature-spirituality. It is certainly revealing of the degree of compromise and syncretism in which even the observant Christians on the list engaged. In the mid to late nineteenth century, the impact of education in the Greek and Roman classics was profound, with virtually all the writers considered, on both sides of the Atlantic, showing an emotional attachment to ancient deities. On the whole, they seem to have regarded Christ as the lord of heaven, but Pan as the benevolent god of the earth, and especially of an increasingly idealised natural world. By the twentieth century this tendency was waning, but so was religiosity in general, its appearances in poetry taking either the form of loss of faith or of a cathartic return to it which itself marked out the person undergoing this as extraordinary. The conclusion of this strange, entertaining, capricious, uneven book returns to Sunday as a symbol of contemporary spiritual variety and confusion, showing that its status as a special day has never been stronger, worldwide, even while it has never been less regarded as the sacred one of a particular faith.