This is a book with a broad scope and ambition. G. examines the Victorian reception of classical antiquity in the fields of art, music and literature. He focusses on the ‘revolutionary’ uses (artistic and political) to which classical material is put, arguing against a mainstream understanding of classical reception as essentially conservative; for G., Victorian culture uses classical material as much to challenge as to bolster establishment and power structures. To make this argument, G. draws on a wide range of texts and contexts, to show the breadth of the nineteenth-century engagement with classical antiquity, and the continual shifts in reception studies – of classical and Victorian material.

In his introduction he explains his approach. Those engaged in the field of classical reception studies must continually be aware of its complexity, a complexity made up of multiple contexts, periods and disciplines. A scholar of the Victorian engagement with classical antiquity, for instance, must not only understand the intricacies of classical culture, but also Victorian culture and, of course, be willing and able to employ contemporary critical approaches. In other words, the field requires of practitioners an enormous range and flexibility. It requires rigour too, which I define here as the ability to draw a clear line of argument through this mass of material – to resist the temptation of arranging the material to suit a particular thesis, and to present an interpretation that is valid and useful. Although the difficulties are apparent throughout, and despite errors pointed out by other reviewers, G. achieves this task in a book that is invigorating in its unusual take on the field, and will provide much food for thought for scholars and students alike.

The book is organised into three main sections on art, opera and fiction. Part 1, ‘Art and Desire’, examines the classicising art of Tadema, Solomon and other British painters on the edge of the Pre-Raphaelite circle. Using an approach that examines the coding of desire through classicised images – of allegorical nudes, and of writers and thinkers such as Sappho and Hypatia – G. argues that classicism offers a cover story for the desire to portray nudity. However, Victorian reception of these paintings shows a variety of responses, from the approving to the scandalised.

Part 2, ‘Music and Cultural Politics’, examines the politics of adaptation and performance. Two main focusses are the operas of Gluck and Wagner – neither strictly ‘Victorian’ composers, but whose works reveal the political dynamics of classical motifs and themes in opera. Gluck's use of classical material to encourage intellectual and emotional engagement in an otherwise déclassé aristocratic form, G. argues, is revolutionary; ironically, however, the shifts in his own reception saw his classicism dismissed as conservative and irrelevant. Wagner's philhellenism, G. argues in a powerful chapter, is used as a cover story for anti-Semitism.

Part 3, ‘Fiction: Victorian Novels of Ancient Rome’, makes a case for the radical properties of the classicising impulse by exploring the hundreds of novels set in the early Christian period. These novels, which united fiction and historicism, both bolster and undermine the church's authority – G. seems more interested in the undermining aspects, arguing convincingly that the emphasis on historical accuracy was as much a challenge to the belief in miracles and the Christian myth as works coming from the scientific community. Yet at the same time, these novels, with their emphasis on historical accuracy, are part of a project to endorse the British (and therefore Christian) Empire.

A coda, on a series of nudes by Andy Warhol, concludes the book – reflecting on his use of the formal qualities of classical sculpture as modified by Victorian versions. When we look at a Warhol nude, then, we see both continuity and iconoclasm – and this is the essential paradox at the heart of G.'s argument, that rather than performing a ‘teleological’ examination of classicism, whereby certain dominant views are naturalised and ordered, reception studies needs to tease out subversive, minor, silenced and shifting patterns.

Another way of putting it is that working in classical reception studies always requires a negotiation between continuity (the classical tradition) and rupture (the proclamation of modernity). Indeed, the book models that balancing act – as can be seen in its very structure. It began as a series of lectures (the prestigious Martin Classical Lectures at Princeton University), and it does show. Readers expecting a grand narrative or theoretical definitiveness from this book, may be disappointed. So too, they may find some of G.'s statements about particular texts, writers, artists or musicians frustrating. This book will not tell us the absolute truth about a text or a context or a particular view – and this continual refusal to perform traditional scholarship may be challenging. Thus, G. somewhat strains the definition of ‘Victorian’, to extend back in time to Gluck (1714–1787) and forward in time to Warhol (1928–1987), as well as to travel in space to France, Germany and the United States.

Further paradoxes abound, such as the relation between canonical and non-canonical forms of art, between the elite and the mainstream. G. seems to revel in finding ‘unlikely’ heroes – the novelist and theologian Frederic Farrar, for instance, whose successful school and historical novels are now unread by all but specialists. Yet Victorian culture is full of these unlikely heroes – writers, thinkers and artists whose work is both conservative and radical. And indeed the relation between mainstream or canonical Victorian culture and minor or marginalised works is not fully explored – though it is hinted at. But G. does not discuss major Victorian novels or poetry – perhaps because it demonstrates a more embedded, less overt engagement with classical material, perhaps because he is making the point that we need to look at less well-travelled territory in our understanding of the reception of classical antiquity.

One further thought: G. claims to value a ‘democratic’ approach – the section on opera is particularly interested in this. Examining material that had a broad reach at the time does show the influence of particular ideas about classical antiquity, for whatever purpose (political, aesthetic). But there are significant gaps that mean we do not have a holistic picture – where are the working class writers, musicians and artists, for example? What about children's literature? What about the literature of education, and indeed, what about the education system itself? Of course, some of these elements extend the bounds set by G.'s already comprehensive title. Here we have the crux of the matter: although the book is exhilarating in the areas it explores and the possibilities it opens for further explorations in nineteenth-century classical reception studies, it leaves one wishing for more.