Stuart Jones has produced a first-rate intellectual biography of one of the most formidable intellectual figures in nineteenth-century Britain, the celebrated Mark Pattison (1813–84), Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, and arguably one of the founders of the modern conception of the ‘research university’. In doing so, Jones has successfully overcome some potential obstacles which might have deterred a less committed scholar. As Jones notes (p. 11), although Pattison ‘was a man who was devoted to the life of the mind, who prized fundamental intellectual inquiry above all things’, no study has hitherto engaged with the substance of his thought or nature of his intellectual endeavours. For too long potential scholars were discouraged by the unappealing impression of a sour and awkward personality left by Pattison's own Memoirs (1885) and by the subject being so thoroughly occupied for so long – from the 1950s to the 1980s – by two notable Oxford college heads, John Sparrow and Vivian Green. Sadly, though the resources in the Bodleian Library for such a study (Pattison's correspondence and diaries) were rich, in the event, both produced little but they were anyway (at least Sparrow) more interested in the man than in his ideas. Jones rightly eschews a traditional biographical approach given the fact that Pattison's life was lived so much in the mind. Instead, Jones successfully combines a detailed and highly original analysis of Pattison's ideas within a strong biographical framework. The study is well structured with the first half devoted to biography and the second to ‘ideas’. What emerges is a searching and illuminating elucidation of a complex personality and evocation of an intellectual temper or cast of mind in the changing contexts of his public life. Pattison did not enunciate a coherent intellectual system, but his contribution to debates on university reform and to the emerging concept of the academic don in the wake of the secularisation of the University of Oxford in which he was prominent for half a century was deep-seated and lasting. Pattison's negative recoil from Newman and the Oxford Movement to which he became so dedicated in his earlier, though not initial, Oxford years (as an undergraduate at Oriel College from 1832 to 1835, he had tended towards liberalism before coming under Newman's influence) is well known. However, Jones has gone much further than anyone else in explaining the likely reasons for Pattison's decade-long commitment to Tractarianism in the first place. He goes behind the smokescreen of Pattison's embarrassed account of this period in his Memoirs, in which he castigated the Oxford Movement as an anti-intellectual force and his own involvement as a terrible aberration (‘fanaticism was laying its deadly grip on me’: Memoirs, 182) and interruption of his natural intellectual course. Jones shows, on the contrary, that at the time Pattison was attracted to the Tractarians precisely because ‘they were radicals who deplored the formalism and laxity of current academic practices and stood for their rejuvenation’ (p. 29) and because the Tractarian movement revived the spirit of learned research in Oxford. Jones recovers the sense in which Tractarianism appealed to Pattison as a member of an idealistic and serious-minded younger generation at Oxford who were impatient with what they regarded as an academic conservatism combined with religious laxity characteristic of Oxford's older generation. Jones shows that Pattison never jettisoned the asceticism of his Tractarian days under Newman's tutelage but merely reapplied it to underpin his ‘German’ idea of university education. The Oxford Movement was anything but a defence of the academic status quo. Only later would Pattison portray it as a reactionary bulwark of anti-intellectual clericalism. While not ignoring his public career (the Rectorship of Lincoln contests of 1851 and 1861 are well documented), Jones devotes most space to charting and explaining Pattison's later intellectual career. He covers his literary periodical journalism, his friendship with the German-Jewish scholar Jacob Bernays and encounter with German literary and philosophical thought in the 1850s and 1860s, his seminal contribution to Essays and Reviews (1860), his study of the great French classical scholar of the early seventeenth century Isaac Casaubon (published in 1875), the gradual erosion of his own personal religious faith, and critique of Comtean Positivism. In an important chapter on the ‘history of ideas as self-culture’, Jones shows that, while it is hard to classify Pattison in terms of modern academic disciplines, his central preoccupation was with what we now call intellectual history: he was a pioneer of the notion that ideas have a history and it was this conviction which prompted his interest in Casaubon. Although Pattison maintained the nobility of the vocation of the scholar and commitment to learning for its own sake, he did not neglect the educational side of a university's work. Jones intriguingly shows that Pattison never abandoned the Newmanian concept of a university rooted in the personal influence of mind upon mind. However, Jones rightly concludes by highlighting Pattison's seminal contribution of inspiring an ‘endowment of research’ movement which eventually ‘won the support of advocates of the kind of public funding of academic science that would transform the university landscape in the twentieth century’ (p. 260).