With this volume Gerhard Besier, the prince of historians of the contemporary Church, launches a new series of publications in the field, edited by himself and his former pupil, Andrea Strübind, now of the University of Oldenburg. This book consists of an English translation of a collection of his papers originally published in German, several of them in his own journal, Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, but many of them in places not easy of access to Anglophone scholars. It is a goodly harvest and the translation, if not always as smooth as Besier's German, is very welcome. It is also a sign of the times. Just as the centre of gravity of the Christian Church has moved to the southern hemisphere, so the centre of gravity of modern church historiography is moving to North America. Besier's base has hitherto been German in every sense of the word, but in these papers there is a surprising stress on American influences on the German church situation during the period of military occupation after the Second World War, a stress which will be informative to British readers. This follows a rather sharp contrast between the accuracy of State Department reporting of what was happening in Germany before America came into the war, and the ineptness of persistent church inquiries. Besier was never a friend to the government of the DDR but here he finds positive things to say both about the writing of church history under that system, and about what the Churches gained from the building of the Berlin Wall. In an anthology of this kind every reader will have his own preferences. I thought the least successful was the first essay, an attempt to cram an overview of ‘Religion and politics in dictatorships and democracies from the Enlightenment to the present’ into one paper, but readers should not be put off by this from the good material to come. In particular there is a great deal of fun in the last paper, analysing how, in Mozambique, the crooked policies of the DDR got into a tangle in the effort to exploit the equally slanted policies of the World Council of Churches to combat racism. This volume is worth buying for the bibliographical material in the footnotes alone, but the whole collection is indispensable in its field.