Saved from destruction by the Great Fire by just a few yards, the Temple church finally succumbed to the Blitz of May 1941. The cold hand of the post-war restoration that followed may help to account for the comparative lack of interest since then in this significant medieval monument. This book amply compensates for this unwarranted neglect, providing a thorough overview of the history of the building from its foundation through the successive accretions and ideologically-charged transformations from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, together with a rich visual record of historic images of the building. The first five chapters focus on the Templars, their religious life and their close involvement in financial dealings, including acting as custodians of royal valuables: a political dimension that would ultimately lead to the downfall of the order in 1308. The hitherto undervalued significance of the architecture of the nave (the rotunda) is brought out by Christopher Wilson, who argues for an early dating in the late 1150s, thus making it among the earliest manifestations of Gothic in England. In 1231 Henry iii chose the church as his place of burial (before transferring his allegiance to St Edward at Westminster) and this may have been the stimulus for the addition of the rectangular choir, the stylistic and typological context for which are extensively discussed by Virginia Jansen. The well-known effigies of knights, and the use of the church as a mausoleum, receive their fullest treatment to date from David Park and Philip Lankester. The history of the church then goes quiet until responsibility for it was handed over to the lawyers of the Middle and Inner Temple in 1608. The next stages in the reconfiguration and refurbishment of the church will be less familiar to most readers, not least because so much of the physical evidence has been destroyed. The first of these was by Wren and his successors between 1682 and 1706 in which, Robin Griffith-Jones argues in a fascinating chapter, the lawyers invested the church with a new history and symbolic meaning relating to legal history and the foundation of English laws. Rosemary Sweet's chapter on changing perceptions of the church during the long eighteenth century draws attention to an often neglected period in the history of churches. Although leaving a visual record, much of the eighteenth-century work was swept away by the attempt in the nineteenth century to restore the church to its former medieval glory in a grand scheme, which William Whyte argues forcefully as of exceptional importance in illustrating the different ideologies of the period. That rich liturgical and decorative scheme perished in the Blitz; sadly for us, but the loss was seen in a different light by the Treasurer of the Inner Temple in the 1940s: ‘To have got rid of their awful stained glass windows, their ghastly pulpit, and their hideous encaustic tiles, their abominable pews and seats … will be almost a blessing in disguise.’ There is much in this book of interest to historians of successive periods from the twelfth to the twentieth century; these essays constitute an indispensable addition to the literature on the Temple Church and its environs.