B. W. Young's book is a scintillating guide to the religious and cultural engagement of Victorian intellectuals with the eighteenth century, their ‘predecessor culture’. His intellectuals are a mostly familiar bunch, situated along an itinerary that runs from Cheyne Row to Bloomsbury via Tractarian Oxford, with a final stop in the Cambridge of M. R. James. Yet Young's pen portraits are not only skilfully done, but combine to form a provocative gallery of responses to the eighteenth century. He notably explodes the cliché that the Victorians were united in disavowing the previous century as a faithless age. Their own religious views were too complex for that. When Carlyle praised Frederick the Great as one of the few true Protestants in a ‘putrid century’, his own ‘Sceptico-Calvinist’ creed meant that this was hardly a conventional judgement. Carlyle had reinvented faith to mean simply sincerity or obedience to a naturalised providence, a definition which could accommodate not just Frederick, but Bayle and Mirabeau, if not quite Voltaire. Similarly, liberal Protestants lamented Gibbon's scepticism but borrowed his irony to criticise Tractarian superstitions. Young's Victorians are not a neat phalanx but a milling crowd, divided by religious temper, family traditions and above all by generation. There is no clear partition between the long eighteenth century and the Victorian age: the two are ‘meld[ed] almost imperceptibly together’ by the continuous tussle between generations, each of which looked back beyond its immediate predecessor to trace a longer genealogy for its own priorities. Thus Henry Hart Milman and John Henry Newman differed profoundly in their use of Gibbon's church history because they belonged to very different Oxfords. An elegant chapter on the ‘family romance’ of the Stephens shows this generational dialectic at work. Leslie and James Fitzjames Stephen inherited but secularised their father's version of the previous century, endorsing his approval of its manliness but denying that its history could be read as a ‘scroll of Providence’. Their writings on eighteenth-century thought helped them to historicise and so partially evade their own evangelical and utilitarian inheritance. This is admittedly not a full account of the Victorian eighteenth century. Even within Young's self-proclaimed limits of ‘intellectual history’ some key figures are omitted or hardly mentioned: Lecky, Pattison or Morley, to name a few. Like Stefan Collini's work, this history is primarily interested in the public persona or the stylistic voice of intellectuals. It allows no room for the kind of connected account of the Victorian reception of such thinkers as Locke, Butler or Paley that a more pedestrian history might have provided. Finally, Young's intellectuals are a highly select group, most of whom came from Oxford common rooms or powerful families. It might have been interesting to complement them with discussion of how, for instance, dissenting writers imagined their own eighteenth centuries. This book usefully provokes further lines of inquiry, while pursuing its own with great aplomb.