Anglicans in southern Ireland are a rare species, declining from about 10 per cent of the population at the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922 to about half that at their numerical nadir 50 years later (they have since increased). Despite their tiny numbers though, economically they tended to punch well above their weight as a result of considerable historical advantages from wealth and education. Nevertheless, living in a virulently Catholic state was like sharing a cage with a purring, but potentially lethal, tiger. So long as the protestant community – with its strange quasi-democratic religious practices and under-the-counter sentimental loyalty to the British crown – kept its head down and eyes averted, it was tolerated – just. But any public defiance would be quickly and brutally stamped on. And so thus, in late 1952, a minor diplomatic incident was caused when the Papal Nuncio walked out of a meeting in Dublin, apparently occasioned by the remarks of an individual who had dared to question the Catholic Church's inactions against the massacres of Orthodox Serbs in Croatia during the Second World War. That individual was Hubert Butler of Kilkenny – ethical protestant, cultural Anglican, librarian, gentleman farmer, writer, traveller, gentle contrarian, public intellectual and the subject of this wide-ranging and complex study by Robert Tobin. (And it is worth mentioning that as an American, an Anglican cleric and currently chaplain of Oriel College Oxford, Tobin brings the detached eye of the outsider to his subject: just as Butler brought his to bear on the national and international world.)

This is much more than a conventional biography. It is an intellectual history in both senses of the phrase. That is, it is about how one literate southern Irish protestant came to terms with his past, and that of his caste; and it is also a work of very considerable intellectual power in its own right, with a wide range of reference to the southern protestant condition generally. Tobin's debt to the Irish historian Roy Foster is evident, both in elegance of language and strength of reasoning. Butler believed his tradition had emerged positively as a champion of personal conscience in Ireland and as an advocate of independent thought, and Tobin traces this through a penetrating analysis of ‘the intellectual genealogy of a southern Irish protestant’ (ch. 1). Coming from what he himself described as ‘minor gentry’ stock (p. 4n), Butler fostered ‘the assertion of a privileged separateness’ (p. 152), but he used it to good effect, though, like Yeats, sometimes to the horror of others – Dean Victor Griffin's comment was, ‘God, he'll get us into trouble’ (p. 154). The search for identity in the ‘new Ireland’ was a constant struggle for some of Butler's co-religionists. For many of these, lineage and tradition, often in the service of the crown, tugged against the embrace of a nationalistic Irishness. Tobin has an astute and acute awareness of the problems raised by this dichotomy, in particular the nationalist-Catholic suspicion that internationalism as practised by the likes of Butler was little more than an ersatz imperialism, an inability to forswear imperial-style nannying.

Given his background, it is perhaps natural that minorities and their treatment in Ireland and the wider world provided the well-spring for his intellectual curiosity. Embodying the last vestiges of Anglo-Irish nationalism, that rarest of minorities within a minority, and the Irish Literary Revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that produced poets and writers such as Yeats, Synge, Russell and Lady Gregory, he was also a John-the-Baptist figure for a younger generation of scholars and controversialists who began to write opinionated pieces in Irish newspapers and journals from the early 1960s; even if his was a voice often crying in the wilderness, a Seán Ó Faoláin from the Protestant side against the ‘piety and prudery’ (p. 42) of Irish Catholic life, the ‘theocratic bog-ocracy’ (p. 150) of one of Butler's correspondents in 1955.

Tobin adopts a challenging, but rewarding, interweaving of the chronological and the thematic to analyse Butler's actions and writings. Thus, the chapters entitled ‘Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism and War’, ‘Irish Community and Protestant Belonging’ and ‘Christianity, Mass Society and the Cold War’ cover the periods 1930–45, 1930–49 and 1945–72 respectively. Elsewhere, he deals with Butler's forays into public controversy and intellectual dissent, and his very considerable interests in archaeology, history and genealogy. Butler – ‘…a man at once preoccupied with but seemingly exempt from the egalitarian sensitivities of the age’ (p. 237) – was increasingly seen as a European writer of intellectual distinction. The reader learns much of the tensions in postwar Yugoslavia, the rise of China, and how Jews were treated in wartime France, and this emphasizes Butler's universalism. It also maybe explains why, even now, he is still not particularly well known in Ireland outside scholarly circles and he never achieved the profile of, for example, Conor Cruise O'Brien. This high-quality book, with its comprehensive listing of Butler's extraordinary output over nearly 60 years, will redress that deficit. Of particular value is its detailed analysis of Butler's involvement in all sorts of things Irish, ranging from esoteric theories about Irish saints (Ten Thousand Saints, 1972), through the Kilkenny Archaeological Society, to opposing the Irish constitutional amendment on abortion in 1983.

Tobin's book is by far the best of a recent blizzard of biographies of Irish Protestant nationalists. Yet this reader senses that the author is just a little uncertain about his subject's real significance: Tobin's valedictory which addresses the progress of pluralism in the island can only claim that there has been ‘a shift for which Butler as much as anyone might well be afforded some credit’ (p. 238). This is perhaps an honest, but less-than-ringing endorsement of Butler's centrality to the liberal project in Ireland. But it does not necessarily invalidate it. The truth is, of course, that intellectual discourse and the elegant essay – Butler's world – are rarified and elitist; their effects may not be apparent for a very long time.