This volume fills an important gap in the literature. It also serves a salutary purpose increasingly left unattended with the decline in interest among academic presses for ‘collected essays'. After all, the conference and/or essay collection remains an essential mechanism for building new academic areas or disciplines, without which over-regulated and time-poor historians find it difficult to construct larger narratives of sufficient scope and meaning. Suitably, then, this volume gathers together some of the best practitioners in the field, starting with the doyen of British Evangelical history (David Bebbington) in a typically focused and source-based account of the Islington Clergy Conference, and finishing with a broad, socially-contextualised study by John Stott's biographer, Alister Chapman, of ‘What Anglican Evangelicals in England learned from the world, 1945–2000’. The collection is deliberately revisionist, taking particular aim at various orthodoxies relating to the centrality of the 1967 Keele Conference as a ‘turning point’ in twentieth-century Anglican Evangelical history. This ensures that there is plenty of sparkle in the narrative (the image, from Ian Randall, of Stuart Holden toddling off to his Scottish estate in his chauffeur-driven Rolls [p.97] is a particularly lasting one), though at the same time it reminds the reader what this collection is not, i.e. a general history of British Anglican Evangelicalism in the twentieth century. From a personal standpoint, the most energetic papers are those by Randall (on the Keswick Convention), Jones (on the resurgence of Evangelicalism in Welsh Anglicanism) and the paper by Chapman. The achievement of each of these is to balance close source work with an address to larger themes, and so an openness to the study of what Chapman reminds us is intrinsically a global movement.

On the other hand, it is the resolute ‘parochialism’ (in several of the available meanings of that term) of British Anglicanism which strikes one in reading this collection. Several of the authors make the obvious link to Callum Brown's work on secularisation and the collapse in British Anglican attendance in the 1960s, and the reader is left expostulating ‘no wonder!’ Anglican concentration on issues such as north, west or east positioning in the liturgy, the resistance to neo-Evangelical innovation in the 1950s, and the classism and racism which beset all elements of the Church (as much among Evangelicals as among others) suggest an almost willing complicity with broader trends towards marginalisation. The historians featured here do not entirely avoid the overly tight self-focus of their subjects: the conservatism of the essay form itself imposes limits on the narrative. An historical aggiornamento such as this, for instance, would have benefitted from more thoroughgoing reference to the sociological work of Brown, or David Martin, or Robin Gill. There seems, however, to be an aversion to crossing disciplinary lines, which blunts distinctions in the book, for example between Evangelicalism as a party as opposed to Evangelicalism as a movement, between the Church of England and the Church in (an increasingly porous national identity called) England. While Maiden works closely on the arc of relationships with Anglo-Catholicism, therefore, there is only scattered reference to the critical relationships with nonconformist Evangelicalism, and the international perspective is introduced rather too late to capture the sense in which Evangelicalism in the Church of England was defined by its continuing transatlantic, Commonwealth and increasingly global linkages. The impact of the Second World War, for example, and of interdenominational voluntarism (for example, the InterVarsity movement) is largely assumed rather than made explicit. The charismatic movement is seen rather as an addition to, than as an intrinsic, if contested and (sometimes forcibly) submerged element, of Anglican spirituality. It is thus depicted through the book as an external ‘event’ which impacted late on the more definitional conflicts between Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics, or as a series of static points, rather than as a constant theme (as Bebbington notes in his treatment of the Methodist and Irvingite movements in his classic Evangelicalism in modern Britain) which posed serious questions about the Church of England. The ‘problem’ of Establishment related, as Mark Smith notes in chapter ix, not only to internal ecclesial tensions with regard to party affiliation or external tensions arising from social pluralisation, but to the increasing emptiness of externalised and clericalised spiritualities, as evident in Victorian Evangelical ‘busyness’ as in Anglo-Catholic ritualism.

Such outcomes are, however, largely the necessary result of compression, compartmentalisation and the implicit terminus imposed by ‘the twentieth century’. Not unlike the experience of many countries in exposing their currencies to global exchange rates, the slow but necessary ‘floating’ of the Church of England on global trends is something watched by many with a keen eye. By the end of the book, the implications of the globalisation, charismaticisation and laicisation of Anglicanism are still working their way out, even though the consequences will be apparent for readers (now living twenty years later) in ways not taken into account in the text. Atherstone and Maiden's introductory image of St Paul's Onslow Square in transition between a ‘great [Victorian] preaching box’ (p. 2) and a space for entrepreneurial charismaticism, therefore, places more stress on the former than on the latter. There is a heavy emphasis on printed sources, of which (given the Evangelical penchant for the printed word) there is no lack. The dynamism of the movement is most evident, however, when (as in Williams's essay) printed and oral sources are combined in a disciplined way. And despite their attempts to address the internal life of particular groups, the accounts remain largely focused on the clergy, rather than the laity.

This collection admirably achieves its aim of relativising Keele as a ‘turning point’: it does so, however, only to raise questions about the significance of the earlier trends which it would seek to put in its place. If at the end all that can be said is that 1967 was part of a longer, more gradual process, then so what? The editors, correctly, point to the continuing need for a high-level organic overview. They are right to ask why such a thing has not been attempted, and what that says about the interface between intellectual and religious history. In the interim, this collection is an excellent stepping stone towards better understanding of its field, at a time when the ‘Southern position’ (ie. the ‘Global South’) is coming to dominate considerations of its subject matter.