Perhaps the best section of this book is the foreword by Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) of Diocleia, who manages to be statesmanlike and hard-hitting at the same time. If only all the Orthodox patriarchs and metropolitans would listen to him when he surveys the whole world of Eastern Orthodoxy and writes: ‘We seem to have no clear and effective procedures for resolving our disagreements.’ And continuing problems there certainly are, as Christine Chaillot's informative book tells us on almost every page. There is no other book which addresses the present state of the Orthodox Church in Europe in such detail. However, it has its deficiencies, too. Translation from the French original and publishing in English have taken a long time, so that most chapters stop short at 2008. Some chapters were originally written in English by authors whose first language it is not; others may have been translated into French and on into English. The patchwork shows and results in many awkward passages, with few positive stylistic attributes. Worst of all is the absence of consistent editing and proof-reading, resulting in innumerable misprints or unacceptable turns of phrase. Who ever let a recent Anglican archbishop appear as ‘George Cary’ (p. 446)? ‘Local council’, never explained, is a more or less literal translation of the Russian pomestny sobor, but its meaning is ‘national assembly’ which, with variants, appears in other places. There is unevenness in the text also. Some authors are more personal than others, notably Archbishop Anastasios of Albania, assigned there from Greece twenty years ago to help in the resurrection of a Church which had been annihilated: ‘The hardy seeds of Orthodox piety, lying dormant in thousands of souls, needed only the proper conditions in which to germinate and flourish once again.’ One feels the archbishop's heartbeat in his text. This is not always so in other chapters. By far the longest is Mikhail Shkarovsky's on the Russian Orthodox Church. His contribution is a useful essay, accurately presenting the bones of Church-State relations in the Soviet Union over the whole of the twentieth century. What is missing, though – and it is an astonishing lacuna – is the ‘feel’ of the persecution and believers’ reaction to it. Metropolitan Sergi's deeply controversial declaration of loyalty under duress in 1927 needs much more analysis. What of the reaction to it, not mentioned, of the bishops imprisoned in the Solovki Monastery prison camp? He does, though, expose the Moscow patriarchate's justification of the USSR's armed intervention in Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, which is a knock-on effect of this into much later times. However, the passionate defence of the Church by so many individual Orthodox believers from the early 1960s onwards goes unremarked. This renewed persecution began with the possible murder of Metropolitan Nikolai in 1961 and ended with that of Fr Alexander Men’ in 1990, neither of which is mentioned. The absence of an index inhibits any search. Elsewhere there is a plethora of information little known to many. Greece and Cyprus feature strongly – and very differently. The very existence of the Orthodox Church in Hungary, (former) Czechoslovakia and Poland will be new to some readers. However, the convoluted and schismatic situation in Ukraine is scarcely illuminated by Sophia Senyk's erratic chapter. Overall, this book, so admirable in intention, promises more than it delivers.