‘History dominated Butterfield's conscious mind, God his spirit, and science, in its broadest sense, as a view of how truth may be attained, operated as a constant undertow when he investigated how the world worked’ (p. 5). Stated baldly, early on within Michael Bentley's magisterial biography, this short portrait of Herbert Butterfield sounds deeply off-putting. But of course the Master of Peterhouse and Cambridge regius professor was both more and less than this suggests. Indeed, it is the great achievement of this book to make Butterfield fully human, rather than the one-dimensional figure that he has become in so many other accounts. Nor is that the only virtue of this biography. It is punctiliously accurate, even taking time – in a footnote – to correct Butterfield's own mistaken recollection that his sister was killed in a collision with a bus when in fact she was knocked over by a car whilst running for a bus. Using the voluminous private notes that the historian obsessively scribbled each evening, and with unprecedented access to a set of revealing letters, Bentley is also able to uncover Butterfield's family life and, more remarkably, his sex life, revealing a hitherto unknown passionate affair in the 1930s. Above all, however, it is the author's expertise in the history of history that makes this biography essential reading for scholars. Deftly weaving together the biographical, the historical and the historiographical, he expertly reveals the personal and professional imperatives that drove Butterfield's work, whilst also situating it within its wider context. Indeed, it is the implied contrast between his subject's sceptical, playful, self-conscious approach to history and the plodding ‘modernist’ tack taken by his contemporaries (and analysed in the same author's 2006 Modernizing England's past) that informs Bentley's claims for Butterfield's importance. Those who do not accept the idea of a modernist turn in English historiography will naturally find this hard to accept, and Butterfield's repeated failure to complete his grands projets makes it a sometimes difficult argument to carry off. But this will, plainly, become the standard work on its subject, and if it does not always quite persuade the reader that Butterfield's work was worthy of the man, then it certainly does sustain the rather austere analysis of Butterfield's religious and intellectual imperatives given above. More than this, and more important than this, the end results fully justify Michael Bentley's immense labour on the subject, producing a study which is a pleasure to read as well as an education. This is a splendid book.