For Anglo-Catholic as well as Roman Catholic clergy the name Fortescue conjures up The ceremonies of the Roman rite described, first published in 1918. But as Aidan Nichol's excellent book shows, liturgical ceremonial was the least of Adrian Fortescue's concerns, and one in which he engaged out of necessity rather than inclination. The necessity was the need for services to be celebrated decently and in order, a concern that he shared with Percy Dearmer, the Anglican advocate of the Use of Sarum. From 1907 until his premature death from cancer in 1923 he was rector of the new parish of St Hugh in Letchworth, the garden city then in process of construction. The church he built and its services he intended to be models of best liturgical practice; and his ministry at Letchworth won him the respect and affection of his parishioners and the wider community. But devotion to his parish did not mean abandoning earlier and wider interests. Born of parents who were converts to Roman Catholicism, his forbears included distinguished Anglican clerics of rural gentry stock. Fortescue's financial independence enabled him in 1906 to embark on an adventurous and occasionally dangerous year of travels in the Middle East, which gave him experience and knowledge of what are now known as the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches. While clear that they were schismatic and heretical bodies, he found them attractive, and at one time considered transferring to the Byzantine rite. His studies bore fruit in many encyclopaedia articles and a number of books, among them The Greek Fathers, The Orthodox Eastern Church and The lesser Eastern Churches. Another, The Uniate Eastern Churches, was unfinished when he died. If for Fortescue the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Churches were in a state of schism and heresy, still more so were Anglicans and Protestants, with some of whom he engaged in polemics. But although certain that the Roman Catholic Church was the one true Church, he was scathingly critical of Rome and the centralising policy of the Vatican, and saw clearly the need for reforms. Nichols sees certain affinities between his subject and F. W. Rolfe's fictional portrait of Pope Hadrian vii. From A. J. Symons's The quest for Corvo he cites these qualities ascribed to Hadrian: ‘his ready command over words, the breadth of his vision, the noble unworldliness of his beliefs and bearing, his mixture of pride and humility, of gentle charity and ruthless reproof for error, his sensitiveness to form and hatred of ugliness’. All of these, for Nichols, are reminiscent of Fortescue. To his premature death, as to Hadrian's, exhaustion could have contributed, for like him he ‘had been astoundingly energetic, in work and at play’. ‘The Latin clerk’, as Fortescue called himself, well deserves the sympathetic presentation of his life and work that Aidan Nichols has given in this informative and readable book.