Benjamin King has entered the company of a small number of recent scholars determined that the life and thought of John Henry Newman will be addressed through critical scholarship rather than hagiography. His study is a systematic examination of Newman's treatment of one particular area of patristic studies. King's book should be read in conjunction with Stephen Thomas's Newman and heresy: the Anglican years (1991). The two authors differ on a few points, but each excellent study complements the other. King divides Newman's intellectual relationship to and his exposition of the Alexandrian Fathers into three periods: the early Tractarian years when he sought to establish a role for the English Church distinct from that of an establishment, the period from 1840 to 1859 when he was concerned with development of doctrine, and 1860–81 when he sought to make his understanding of the Alexandrian Fathers conform to changing papal policies. King's study clearly demonstrates, perhaps even more clearly than he realises, that Newman's scholarship was always engaged with contemporary ecclesiastical controversy and that scholarship for Newman represented one more weapon in the armoury of the ecclesiastical polemicist. Two features of King's elegant book will especially interest Newman scholars. First, King more carefully and precisely than any previous scholar examines Newman's patristic studies through his sermons. King explores the manner whereby the assignments of the lectionary presented Newman with biblical texts that he used to work through many of the same issues that the Fathers addressed centuries earlier. No previous scholar has so splendidly meshed Newman's parish concerns with his scholarship. Second, King very persuasively argues that Newman's late patristic scholarship functioned as part of his campaign to make his thought acceptable to papal authority. Here King may have untangled a problem that he does not address, but an important one for Newman scholarship. Lord Acton repeatedly saw the elderly post-Apologia Newman as an ultramontane. Acton did not much explain his accusation. King's analysis of Newman's late patristic analysis may provide a clue and may indicate what Acton saw in Newman's later writings that others until King have only marginally addressed. King's is a book that should command the attention not only of anyone interested in Newman but that of all serious students of Victorian theology and religious thought. It is a remarkably careful and engaging study that will shape Newman historiography for many years to come.