In what is now the 122nd volume in the Maynooth Studies in Local History, David Doyle sketches the career of the Revd Thomas Goff (1772–1844) as a Church of Ireland minister, military chaplain, landlord and intellectual. This is possible because Goff kept a diary for more than fifty years, amounting to some 185,000 words of reflection on the weather, politics, the burdens of ascendancy and the finer points of Anglican theology. (The atonement was a favourite subject.) He accumulates property, evicts tenants, marries well and compulsively denounces Unitarians and successive ‘arch fiends’, Napoleon Bonaparte and Daniel O'Connell. He also comments on books, mourns his children, prepares sermons and gives to charity. Thomas Goff was an almost archetypical Irish Protestant, albeit wealthier than most: well-intentioned, cultivated, frightened, patriotic and aware, even in the first half of the nineteenth century, that the old ascendancy was unlikely to survive the union and Catholic emancipation. Doyle's pamphlet is a timely introduction to this interesting figure, whose long life was almost exactly contemporaneous with that of O'Connell. His hitherto overlooked diary is undoubtedly a source of great interest for Irish history in general and the Church of Ireland in particular. The pamphlet itself is not without its flaws – it jumps from topic to topic and decade to decade with little warning and wastes limited space on genealogical trivia – but Goff is a worthy subject and Doyle's work a useful contribution to the growing literature on Irish Protestantism in its twilight phase.