In a famous essay Isaiah Berlin once observed that every thinker is either a hedgehog or a fox. Hedgehogs pursue a single-minded course: their thought determined by one, all-consuming, idea. Foxes, by contrast, revel in a multiplicity of disconnected themes; they know much about a lot but have no unifying principle to articulate. With his fondness for animal allegory, this distinction would have appealed to the Victorian historian James Anthony Froude. But which was he? The variety of his writing and apparent changes of mind might suggest the fox, yet in this magisterial intellectual biography Ciaran Brady is keen to establish that he was a hedgehog: a man whose voluminous – and controversial – output was driven by an all-consuming effort to provoke his readers into action, to moralise the society in which he lived. It is a bold claim and one sustained by a huge amount of incredibly sensitive reading. Although its subject was brilliantly anatomised by the greatest of all modern historiographers, John Burrow, in his Liberal descent (1981), it is clearly the case that this is the most serious and sustained analysis of Froude ever written. That Ciaran Brady is an early modernist moonlighting amongst the Victorians is barely perceptible. The nagging suspicion remains, however, that Froude does not really deserve so subtle a study from such an intelligent interpreter. He was a novelist who could not write, a historian whose works were riddled with error, and a polemicist whose publications irritated his own allies. True enough, he gained a wide readership, but this was almost certainly not because of the sophistication of his ideas. Arguably, his real interest lies less in his thinking than in the reception of his thought. All of which suggests that Froude was neither a hedgehog nor a fox, nor indeed any of the other animals that he described in his Æsopian fables. Rather, he was a peacock: a creature highly successful at drawing attention to itself but whose shrill cries were essentially meaningless.