Following on from Dietz Lange's valuable, earlier collection of Söderblom's correspondence (rev. this Journal lix [2008], 798) comes this splendid new biography. Dietz Lange himself is much to be congratulated on persevering with his chosen task so admirably and his publisher has surely served him well. What we now have does much to bring this tremendous figure, at once superbly idealistic and pragmatic, out of the indistinct background to which he has for some years been so dismally consigned. Together the two stout volumes mark a handsome contribution to scholarship. Lange certainly does insist on placing Söderblom firmly in his landscapes, and these are successively intellectual, institutional, ecclesiastical, ecumenical and international. In such a life abstract ideas and practical situations interweave and reinforce each other with genuine vigour. Lange gives the reader valuable insights into the many currents of intellectual life which prospered earnestly in the Swedish faculties in the later nineteenth century. It is the discipline of church history which does much to make the man. But also he is never less than cosmopolitan – in fact, his credentials as an internationalist are established very early indeed, with a spell in the United States and a pastorate in Paris. Subsequently two august academic positions in Uppsala and then Leipzig fall neatly into line. Then, almost suddenly, the primacy comes into view and the man is ready for the moment. It is 1914. By now the book is half done. As Söderblom navigates the high plains of Swedish church life Lange again proves a tidy interpreter, dividing his treatment into themes – the pastor, the preacher, the church leader, the realms of Church and State. Much of this is essentially domestic, but it leans soon enough into the great international narratives of the new ecumenism which Söderblom so confidently made his own The Stockholm conference of the Life and Work movement in 1925 inevitably marks the high-tide level of the Söderblom effect at large. Here he at last becomes visible to the Christian world, busy with resolutions on war and peace and forging a new international basis for involvement in the affairs of the world. Lange is not over-awed by this – he even summons up the temerity to ask: to what did it all amount? A concluding reflection reinforces the overall sense that this is, perhaps, more a Söderblom for historical theologians than one for scholars of the history of international movements. Lange himself is a systematic theologian. But then his subject is indeed a vast one, rich in many dimensions, and there is still much room for development. What the author has given us is invaluable because it opens many doors, not least onto that immense stage once bestrode by colossi determined to summon up all their convictions, and combine all their opportunities, in order to redeem the disastrous age which they inhabited. If these ideals are no longer to the taste of theologians they should become all the more consciously the responsibility of the historians.