Building on the author's The death of Christian Britain: understanding secularisation, 1800–2000 (London 2001), this book offers an authoritative, sophisticated and elegantly-written introduction for students to the far-reaching religious and moral changes in twentieth-century Britain, including a reduction in church and Sunday school attendance, a growth in religious pluralism and a decline in the influence of the Churches and of religious ideas on government, education and social welfare. The arrangement is chronological, with six core chapters tracing the development of institutional and personal religion in 1900–14, 1914–19, 1920–45, 1945–59, 1960–73 and 1974–2000. There is no separate conclusion. The process by which formal religion has evolved from a central to a marginal role in society is perceptively documented and interpreted, commencing with the Edwardian heyday of British Christian culture. The inter-war years witnessed a transition ‘from puritan enforcer to liberal comfy sofa’ (p. 145), before giving way to an intensification of moral conservatism and a resurgence of evangelism during the 1950s. The assault on authority during the cultural revolutions of the 1960s, especially sexual liberation and feminism, caused substantial fallout for religion, and the decade is pinpointed as the tipping-point in Britain's transformation into what Brown describes as one of the most secularised, specifically de-Christianised, of nations, at least so far as the white population is concerned. The increasing and peculiar blend of indifferentism (lack of interest, not militant atheism), religious fundamentalism (affecting Islam, Judaism and Christianity) and diffusive spirituality (or ‘new age’) of the 1980s and 1990s is well brought out. The book draws on a wide range of secondary literature, but there is also some original research, particularly on newspapers (religious and secular), autobiographies and oral history. Examples are cited from the principal religious traditions, Christian and non-Christian, and from across the United Kingdom, albeit a little disproportionately from Scotland. Although quantitative sources are quoted, they are not systematically analysed, apart from in the introduction. For a thorough appraisal of the statistics of the various denominations, social surveys, opinion polls, enumerations of church attendance since the late 1970s and the government's census of religious profession of 2001, the reader will largely have to look elsewhere. This is presumably one manifestation of the publisher's desire to produce a non-technical volume for the textbook market. Other indications are the explanation of fairly simple religious terms (such as blasphemous), and the inclusion of sixteen analysis panels, extending to almost forty pages in aggregate. The latter are not always well integrated with the adjoining text and sometimes intrusive, while the longest, five-and-a-half pages on the sexual scandal of the Revd Harold Davidson, is plainly excessive, being virtually equivalent to the entire coverage of the Second World War. Finally, there might have been more discussion of parallel interpretations of events, for example Christie Davies's The strange death of moral Britain (New Brunswick, NJ 2004), missing from the guide to further reading, with its concept of the U-curve of deviance, whose turning-points were said to be the First World War and the latter half of the 1950s.