Solomon's secret arts is an engaging, diligently researched and very readable survey of occult practices and beliefs in Britain in the long eighteenth century. Monod's modest claim that his book intends to offer ‘a general framework within which the history of occult thinking can be understood’ (p. 14) underplays the fact that this text forms an important bridge between histories of early modern and modern magical thought. Whilst it may not be the first study to focus on eighteenth-century magic, few of its predecessors can lay claim to the impressive level of authoritative detail presented here. While frequently drawing upon potted individual biographies to illustrate particular occult and cultural trends, Monod retains a masterly rein on his larger narrative. Solomon's secret arts argues that occult thought and practices waxed and waned in response to the Enlightenment's broader cultural, religious, scientific and political developments. Beginning with the occult's notable presence in the mid seventeenth-century turmoil of the civil war, Monod narrates magic's subsequent downturns in the early eighteenth century, its reconfigured and reinvented revivals from the 1760s, and finally tracks another decline from the 1790s as the occult became associated with Freemason conspiracies, radical prophecies and other loyalist fears in the context of the French Revolutionary Wars. This intriguing pulsing of occult cultures both contests and complicates orthodox notions of magic's decline or continuation as it made the transition from the early modern to the modern period. As Monod concludes, ‘the occult was not killed off by science or the Enlightenment’ but rather ‘coexisted with them [and] borrowed from them’ (p. 346). Monod avoids explicitly positioning his study in relation to the rich historiographical debates surrounding the nature of the Enlightenment itself. This felt like a missed opportunity, as his work clearly has much to offer such discussions. His fascinating accounts of alchemists, astrologers, prophets and the publishers who disseminated their ideas into the public sphere help to emphasise how much familiar interpretations of the Enlightenment as an age of rational, material and coldly scientific worldviews have been filtered through an inherited lens of Romanticist propaganda and opposition. Clearly a book of importance for scholars and students working in the field of occult and magical histories, it should also be read as a reassessment of the Enlightenment in Britain.