This is a fascinating and quite original book. As the title indicates, it is about names – the names of God. It falls into two, roughly equal parts, and a good deal of the originality of the approach lies in the juxtaposition thus achieved. Part i is about the theology of divine names found in Dionysios the Areopagite; part ii is concerned with medieval Slavonic texts that count and list the names of God – seventy-two in these texts. It would be very easy for such a project to remain very superficial. In this case, not so, owing to the enormous erudition that Valentina Izmirlieva brings to her subjects. It is a rich and diverse erudition. Her Dionysian scholarship (where I am more at home) is up-to-date and thoroughly grounded; the same is true of the discussion of the Slavonic texts, where one suspects she is more at home. Her discussion of lists draws on the sociology of knowledge (although I missed any mention of Mary Douglas's work in this area). The placing of the Slavonic texts is especially fascinating. The provenance of seventy-two (or seventy) is pursued into all sorts of areas of learning – physiology, medicine, linguistics, semiotics, biblical scholarship, the Kabbalah and magic. Izmirlieva convinces us that only with this range of allusion is it possible to grasp the many strategies served by these magical lists of divine names. She also redeems magic. In a final chapter she draws her threads together, showing how the intellectual universe opened up by Dionysios provides a context in which to understand the lists of names discussed in the second part. This final chapter makes effective use of Levinas and his distinction between totality which seeks closure and infinity which remains open to the beyond: it is perhaps too short, as it does not so much conclude, as open up new fields, and it matches the play of learning that characterises the rest of the book. It is very rarely that, having read a work of scholarship, I want to read it again right through (rather than check up on some parts of it), but that is what I felt as I approached – all too soon, it seemed – the end of this book. That is partly, too, because it is written so well, itself the sign of the clarity of expression and profundity of conception that the author combines. It is no exaggeration to say, as Dr Kizenko does on the back cover, that this is ‘one of the rare books that will redefine a field’. It suggests connexions that one would never have made before, and admits one to a kind of kaleidoscopic vision that will continue to disturb the more confined ideas with which one had approached these topics hitherto. It might even change your life.