This is the fifth title in Ashgate's new Archbishops of Canterbury series and the first study of a nineteenth-century archbishop. Compared to Tait, Benson or even the first Evangelical archbishop, John Bird Sumner, Howley is little known yet his working life spanned a crucial period in Church and State encompassing both the major period of church reform and the formative years of the Oxford Movement. Bishop of London from 1813 to 1828 and then archbishop until 1848, Howley lacked a nineteenth-century biographer perhaps because his reputation suffered at the hands of Whig politicians and the coolness of the Tractarians. He was also a shy man with a poor speaking voice and presence. James Garrard rescued him from relative obscurity in his Oxford DPhil thesis in 1992 and the subsequent article in the new ODNB. Seen by many politicians and others as a reactionary cleric out of tune with the ‘Age of Improvement’, Howley was in time converted to the need for significant church reform and chaired the Ecclesiastical Commission throughout the 1830s and '40s as well as pushing through the reform of cathedrals which sounded the death knell of ‘Barset’. Garrard's reassessment outlines these activities in a scholarly and clear way utilising all the available primary and secondary sources. It is further demonstration of the influence that the old High Church party exercised in the early nineteenth century through its links with government, influential laity, its patronage networks and its concern to defend the role of the Church in education. Although reticent in spirituality and firmly wedded to Establishment and the Church`s role within it, once galvanised the ‘high and drys’ were capable both of spearheading reform and carrying it through. The chapter on the Oxford Movement is also enlightening as it gives us, unusually, the ‘view from Lambeth’ where Howley's chaplain Benjamin Harrison was a Tractarian sympathiser in contact with the leaders and so bridging both worlds. Despite its relative brevity this is a concise and scholarly study which, despite its specific focus, does not lose sight of the wider context. About a third of the book consists of primary sources: Howley's Charges, his provincial Letter on ritualism and some of his speeches in the House of Lords relating to parliamentary reform and education. This is a fine addition to what will be a helpful series. Garrard has shown that the usual tepid assessment of Howley's primacy is misplaced.