Roger Hutchins's British University Observatories is impressive in many respects. The product of many years of painstaking research in British and overseas archives, it delivers a close-up history of the six major British university observatories that engaged in research: Oxford, Trinity College Dublin, Cambridge, Durham, Glasgow and London University's Mill Hill Observatory. British University Observatories incorporates existing literature while providing a phenomenal amount of new information about the actors, instruments and politics involved in almost two centuries of these institutions’ existence. Fortunately, the equally impressive bibliography, index and synthetic tables help the reader navigate this encyclopedic volume, as does the author's clear, factual prose, and his sure-footed guidance through the convoluted history of these observatories and their inhabitants.

The overarching structure of the volume is chronological, whereby each chapter is organized around a major theme or concern affecting the group of observatories in a given period, such as the recurring tension between teaching and research within university observatories, or the response of universities to the challenges and opportunities offered by astrophysics. In this way the narrative stays very close to the nitty-gritty details of the history of each observatory without losing track of the wider, especially international, context and the long-term trends. This helps underline, for instance, the intensely collective, networked and transnational nature of observatory work at all times. Though Hutchins writes that his ‘is not a history of the observatories’ instrumentation nor therefore of technical constraints on their science’ (p. 8), his profound knowledge of the technicalities of observatory work is put to good use to demonstrate the constraining or enabling power of technology to an extent matched by few other fields of scientific investigation. Perhaps even more than budgets or staff competence, the size, power and quality of its telescopes conditioned an observatory's options and the value of its realizations. Observatory science was undoubtedly the big science of these times.

And for this very reason, the history of these chronically understaffed and underfunded observatories racing against the obsolescence of expensive technology in a rapidly evolving field is often a poignant one. The heroic efforts of a handful of astronomers labouring under inclement skies to pursue typically time-consuming, expensive, long-term projects (such as Oxford's involvement with the Carte du ciel photographic project) could not measure up to the rise, and soon the dominance, of American astrophysics from the late nineteenth century. Only the Cambridge observatories, with the incorporation of Lockyer's solar physics observatory, active support on the part of the university and its well-connected alumni, together with a number of opportune donations, were effectively able to thrive and occupy a prominent place on the international stage before new developments such as theoretical astronomy or the foundation of British observatories overseas helped astrophysics to become established on a more stable institutional footing in British universities. Not the least merit of the book is to show the range of imaginative solutions devised by British astronomers in the pursuit of their science in underfunded observatories under less than ideal skies, explaining, for instance, the rationale for Herbert Turner's (subsequently much criticized) decision to dedicate the Oxford University Observatory to seismology.

Altogether meticulously written, well illustrated and carefully produced, British University Observatories will usefully complement studies on the better-known actors of British astronomy, the grand amateurs and the state-run observatories.