This is a valuable book, elegantly conceived and written, rich in material and vivid with ideas. Daniel Inman places the character and status of the study of theology firmly in the institutional framework of the University of Oxford, showing how membership of the Church of England and an examination in Divinity began as a universal requirement for a place of any kind in the university but theology eventually became simply a subject which found its place within a greater whole. At the heart of this rests uneasily the question of what a university exists to do, intellectually, politically and morally, in the context of a broader establishment or society. The progressive change in tone across the book is conspicuous. However much lip-service was paid across the institution, Victorian opinion could stir and go to war over Divinity, seeing everything that was vital in both Church and State at stake in it, campaigning vehemently and lapsing into tragic despondency when noisy causes failed. Personality mattered, particularly if it was that of Pusey or Liddon, and church party defined much that was idealistic and, of course, unreasonable. Their twentieth-century successors were not without fertile principles or constructive ideas, but it is hard to sense that they lost much sleep over what went on. After a final public flourish in 1913 we move inexorably towards smaller and more obscure propositions about how Theology might exist as a department of the Humanities. Perhaps this suggests that the history of Theology at Oxford is something to be located beside the parallel histories of other subjects and departments there, which might almost be considered competitors; perhaps it simply shows the encroachments of professionalism and secularisation across society at large. But this is not simply a narrative of contracting proportions. Inman also shows that in other ways the theological interest at Oxford yielded an increasing breadth, even generosity. The myths and rigidities of an Anglican establishment were by degrees broken down. The study of theology at Oxford opened up, cautiously, to Nonconformists of all kinds, many of whom had by the end of the nineteenth century decamped to Oxford itself and opened their own colleges there, eventually incorporated as Permanent Private Halls within the university. Apart from the figure of Andrew Michael Fairburn, Inman makes rather little of their intellectual contributions, even so. The great Baptist Old Testament scholar Henry Wheeler Robinson receives only a passing nod. Their presence in Oxford here demonstrates the incorporation of other denominations within the institution, but not, it seems, very much more. One of the defining virtues of the book is the insistence that this is not merely a tale of provincial learning, but a drama to be located in the wider landscape of the modern university in the greater world. There are a few anxious glances across to Cambridge, particular in the glory days of Hort and Lightfoot. The foundation of the new theological colleges of the later nineteenth century is noted as evidence that the world of the mind was only a part of what was involved in the formation of a class of clergy, and not perhaps the defining part. But it is, at large, the tremendous impressiveness of the German faculties which casts the longest shadow. Here the figure of Pusey himself is powerfully suggestive, caught up in a state of painful, and quite intractable, ambiguity, by turns revering and resenting, adopting and repudiating. Where did this go in the twentieth century? B. H. Streeter felt that Martin Dibelius and Karl Barth had put Christianity itself in a bad way. Bishop Headlam, who was then a presiding presence over much reform at Oxford after the First World War, mocked the writings of Barth as a riot of theories, unproven and unproveable. In the 1920s and 1930s it was Oxford Nonconformists like W. B. Selbie and Nathaniel Micklem who observed German scholarship most keenly and profitably. In sum, while Inman is not over-generous to the great reforms attempted by Henry Scott Holland and his allies in 1913, at the end of the book he acknowledges that the teaching of theology very largely ended up with what they had proposed none the less. At its best, his book brings a sense of ancient intensities powerfully to life. If the rational accommodations which followed these storms appear far less exciting to the reader, it can hardly be the fault of an admirable historian.