This edition of essays is focused on the work of an unusual scholar, Maurice Cowling (1926–2005). He was both an intellectual and a political historian, one who went against the grain of his contemporaries in placing religion at the centre of his analysis. He also exercised considerable influence as a teacher and scholar at Peterhouse, Cambridge, despite actively discouraging disciples, as is clear from several of the contributions here. The connecting theme of his work is the concept of ‘public doctrine’, the changing sets of authoritative belief that held the British polity together – particularly its elites – from the decline of the confessional state after 1828 to the present. Secularisation, he insisted, made no difference to the religious foundation of political power in ‘doctrine’ of one kind or another; neither could the trappings of doctrine disguise the overwhelmingly Machiavellian purposes of those who wielded power. Nevertheless, as James Alexander points out, it was Cowling's achievement to keep ‘civility’ distinct from ‘ecclesiasticality’, as well as affirming the priority of ‘subjectivity’, the cornerstone of his work as an historian. One of the many merits of this volume is that it emphasises the spiritual significance of Churches in a political context; also that temporal institutions maintain their ecclesiastical nature well after the decline of the religion which shaped them. Certainly this is true of Christianity in the context of Britain. Ian Harris shows how much Cowling's originality owed to Charles Smyth and through him, Edwyn Hoskyns at Cambridge in the 1940s, two theologians who sought to restore the Johannine basis of Anglicanism against the latitudinarian trends of the Church. S. J. D. Green turns to Cowling's application of this influence to the writing of British intellectual history since c. 1840 in his three-volume Religion and public doctrine in modern England (1980–2001). Philip Williamson focuses on Cowling's political histories, exploring the elite-centred nature of the works that constituted his other trilogy: Disraeli, Gladstone and revolution (1967), The impact of Labour, 1920–1924 (1975), and The impact of Hitler: British politics and British policy, 1933–40 (1975). Cowling's relationship with two other conservative thinkers at Cambridge – Herbert Butterfield and Michael Oakeshott – is touched upon by Michael Bentley and Kenneth Minogue respectively; they too were concerned with defining the intersection between religion and politics. The vibrancy of Cowling's legacy is apparent in all the chapters, including that of the youngest scholar in the editorial team – Robert Crowcroft; his contribution is perhaps most fashioned in the polemical style of Cowling, repeatedly discounting any role for idealism in the history of the Labour party. At various levels Cowling and his followers are animated by a contempt for what they see as a pervasive liberalism in the politics and thought of modern Britain, one that has set out to suppress Christianity without recognising the subjectivity of its own ‘assumptions’. In that sense the book is as much a call to arms as an exercise in historiographical renewal, maintaining Cowling's pressure on the liberal establishment, especially the academic profession at its core.