The late nineteenth century was a golden age for the Nonconformist weekly and quarterly press, and from 5 November 1886 it was led by The British Weekly, subtitled from its first issue ‘A Journal of Social and Christian Progress’. Its key voice for thirty-five years (and nominally until his death in 1923) was William Robertson Nicoll. Since T. H. Darlow's adulatory biography in 1925, which conceals as much as it reveals, there has been no substantial book on Nicoll. Starting out as a minister of the Free Church of Scotland at Dufftown and then Kelso, Nicoll was forced south to Hampstead for health reasons after contracting typhoid and then pleurisy. Having already begun some religious journalism in a modest way in Scotland, he persuaded Hodder and Stoughton to back his idea for a new weekly with a campaigning edge, intended to appeal to both English (and Welsh) Nonconformists and to Scottish Presbyterians: hence the use of the adjective ‘British’ in the title. From the beginning the Weekly was on the side of Liberalism. Nicoll also ensured that it provided a friendly home for progressive theological thought, including the acceptance of moderate biblical criticism. In this way the Weekly found a ready readership among ministers and ordinary church members. Not surprisingly it overtook the circulations of denominational weeklies like the Baptist Times or the Christian World. One of Ives's most significant contributions is to show the importance of the Scottish dimension in Nicoll's editorial policy. At no point was this more apparent than during the First World War, when the Weekly did not follow the pacifist line that might have been expected by English Nonconformists. Nicoll's close relationship with Lloyd George became even more important as the war proceeded. Robertson Nicoll was not a typical Nonconformist: his ability to take a two-month winter break on the Riviera was not a normal part of the life of a Free Church minister north or south of the Scottish border, but his genuinely delicate health and aristocratic patronage provided the reason and the means for such a life-style. In many ways the content of the Weekly broadened the Nonconformist outlook, with articles on travel, fiction and social issues (but never sport). Nicoll was concerned about Nonconformist decline, especially among young men, and disappointed by the lack of the revival after the war, which he had expected. But he failed to appreciate the fundamental changes in society which were both caused and revealed by the war; and his death came at an opportune time for a new editor to sustain the Weekly's readership in a new age. This book is a significant addition to our understanding of a difficult transition in the life of the minority Churches in this country.