This major work of immense detail, learning and scholarship traces the development of the English school curriculum from the early sixteenth century to the eighteenth. Ian Green argues that our understanding of what English schools inculcated has been skewed by an undue emphasis on religious instruction, whereas the core dimension of the curriculum, the remarkably resilient classical humanist programme first introduced before the Reformation, has been relatively neglected. The case is partly quantitative: Green traces the use in English schools of the vast numbers of printed works comprising ancient authors and humanist supplementary materials over three centuries. This is combined with evidence such as school statutes and personal testimony to demonstrate the extraordinary longevity of ancient authors such as Cicero, as well as Latin works from the first half of the sixteenth century, most notably the Latin grammar written by the first High Master of St Paul's, William Lily, which was one of early modern England's bestsellers and was only displaced in the Victorian age (by Kennedy's Latin primer, from which I learned Latin at grammar school, badly, in the early 1980s). Green demonstrates that the case for a strong Puritan impact on the system as a whole has been exaggerated. In contrast to many school systems elsewhere in Europe, both Catholic and Protestant, religious instruction occupied a relatively minor place in the English school curriculum and, despite some piecemeal attempts at censorship, the content of the classical material remained overwhelmingly secular and even pagan. Green's final chapter attempts to link the classical education received by so many of the English gentry and nobility for generations with manifestations of classicism in the cultural sphere at large, such as in art, architecture and inscriptions. Green's work seems to me to challenge a dominant model of historical thinking which places the Reformation and religious change at the centre of the narrative. Since the establishment of a humanist curriculum was soon followed by almost a century of exponential growth in the number of schools founded, for better or worse we seem to have here one of the keys to understanding the shape of cultural life among the English middle and upper classes for three centuries and more.