Stephen Neill (1900–84) was one of the most academically gifted Anglican scholars and writers of his generation. After a stellar career at Cambridge, including a Trinity Prize Fellowship, he went to India as a missionary. After a brief and acrimonious time at the Dohnavur Fellowship in South India he joined the Church Missionary Society and quickly become one of its stars in theological and ministerial education. In 1939 he became bishop of the diocese of Tinnevelly, had a profound and lasting impact there, and was spoken of as a possible metropolitan (primate) of the Church of India, Burma and Ceylon. In 1949 he had to leave his bishopric and India in highly controversial but obscure circumstances. Thereafter he held no high ecclesiastical office, although he was an assistant bishop to the archbishop of Canterbury: he was primarily a peripatetic academic and author, and a leader of the ecumenical movement. This study deals with the years to his departure from India. It draws on a wide range of primary sources in India and the UK, but sadly not on Neill's private papers to which the author was not allowed access. Neill never married and his heirs clearly feel that they were intended to be private, and intend to block access to them for fifty years if they are eventually deposited at Lambeth Palace Library, by which time (in the words of one of them) ‘hopefully by then it won't matter to anyone’ (p. 20 n. 81). This book bears the hallmarks of its origins as a well-researched thesis; although it has small but irritating scholarly errors, and too much quotation from secondary sources where the author possibly feels insecure, as on Indian politics and nationalism. Readers will find insights into a turbulent era in Indo-British relations and the impact of these on relations between missionaries and Indian Christians, as well as tensions within the missionary community. From the perspective of Indian Christianity this is an opportunity lost compared with S. Billington Harper's nuanced biography (2000) of Azaraiah, the first Indian Anglican bishop whom Neill knew. But the core interest is in the character and actions of Neill. The leitmotif offered is conflict – and readers are told repeatedly, and rather irritatingly, that the various stages of Neill's life were ‘conflicted’. But why? Deeper study of Neill's character and its development, his social isolation as an unmarried missionary, his sense of academic superiority and, crucially, his Evangelical theological formation, would have explained some of his inner and outer turmoil, and prepared the reader for the tragic denouement when Neill had to resign his bishopric. All his adult life he suffered from depression and insomnia and in the 1940s was being treated on a long-term basis by a psychiatrist in England. Another later referred to him as suffering from manic depression, not uncommon among the profoundly gifted and creative. Clearly contributing to this was an overdeveloped sense of godly discipline and punishment which could lead him to be tyrannical towards himself and to others. The physical chastisement of an Indian Christian led to his departure from India and similar manifestations of an inwardly tortured conscience remained a lifelong weakness. (One sensitive reviewer of the posthumous autobiography, which hid these darker places in Neill's character, finally in 1991 placed them in the public domain although others close to Neill had chosen to keep them secret.) The whole life cries out for informed understanding, to do justice to one whose later writings made a profound contribution to his Church and its ecumenical relations.