Christopher J. Walker belongs to an omnivorous, non-professional species of historian which is perhaps regrettably in decline, and which tends to supply writing that is punchier and more accessible than that of many REF-hounded scholars in the Academy. At certain moments his latest book (earlier works include a history of Armenia, and a life of Oliver Baldwin) offers crisp and robust analysis, and a mapping of complex philosophical disputes which is admirably lucid. The breadth of Walker's learning and interests is undoubtedly remarkable.

However, this is not a study which could have been produced by anyone engaged currently in professional research in the field of early modern religion, politics or intellectual history: it is unashamedly polemical, partisan and teleological. It is a paean to the Erasmian spirit of critical, rational enquiry, kept in Genevan and Roman captivity for much of the sixteenth century, but which finally flowered in the Socinian movement and the theological minimalism of late seventeenth-century English intellectuals. The title misleads, and most of part i is not strictly about radical dissent in the later period, but rather surveys the (pernicious) origins of Trinitarian dogma in the early Church; the progressive and prophetic voices of sixteenth-century radicals, from Denck to Servetus; the development of Socinianism; and finally the precocious freethinking of the English Civil Wars and its subsequent repression. The second part, more closely researched and chronologically focused, narrates the controversies over reason and the Trinity in England in the 1690s. While primary bibliography is not lacking, and there is some engagement with modern historians (though one strongly detects the primary influence of Trevor-Roper throughout), there are profound lapses of hermeneutical discipline and distance. The author's sympathies are stridently voiced throughout. From the outset, a reified ‘English’ temper in religion – moderate and liberal – is contrasted to ‘monkish’ and ‘Quakerish’ religion, and ‘fierce and militant’ (not to mention ‘gloomy’) Calvinism. The paradoxes of anti-dogmatic royalism, and the rigid Trinitarianism of ‘the King [William iii], whose arrival had freed the lives and consciences of Englishmen from despotism’ (p. 221) do not get in the way of a narrative that is, if not Whiggish, then passionately anti-Tory. It points towards an essentialised English Christianity that is practical, questing and mild rather than contentious or authoritarian. Above all, it is the Socinian spirit that characterises, for Walker, the ‘best of Anglicanism’ (p. 241), while no true Anglican can be at ease with the ‘boneheaded ultradevoutness’ of the Anglo-Catholics. The fact that most of his exemplary rationalists were, in fact, dissenters from the English Church, and that Anglicanism is still uncompromisingly Trinitarian, does not sit easily with this conclusion.