Falcetta has provided a spirited account of the exceptionally long career of James Rendel Harris, one of the leading textual critics and manuscript collectors in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century. Having been elected as a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, in 1878 to teach mathematics, Harris soon became seduced by the approach to Scripture as mastered by (the former scientist) H. J. A. Hort, leading him to devote himself to biblical studies from 1881. Like many Nonconformist theologians in Oxford and Cambridge during this period, Harris exhibited a fearlessness in his critical approach to the Bible that led to a far more adventurous scholarly life than many of his Anglican colleagues. Although raised a Congregationalist, he became a Quaker after marrying Helen Balkwill and joining her in a missionary endeavour to the United States in 1885 where, after a spell at Johns Hopkins, he secured a theological post at Haverford College near Philadelphia. It was during a sabbatical from Haverford that the couple made their first visit (of seven during his lifetime) to the Middle East to find and purchase manuscripts. Over the course of these expeditions, Harris secured a significant number of codices for Western libraries, including Syriac versions of the Apology of Aristide and the Odes of Solomon. Falcetta records these expeditions in exceptional detail and good humour, not least the 1892 visit to Sinai with the so-called ‘Sisters of Sinai’ (Margaret Dunlop Gibson and Agnes Lewis, whose contributions to scholarship are detailed in Janet Soskice's Sisters of Sinai [New York 2010]) and, less comfortably, the more senior Cambridge textual scholars F. C. Burkitt and R. L. Bensley (with whom Harris published the Four Gospels in Syriac from the Sinaitic palimpsest in 1894). No less engaging is Falcetta's careful tracing of Rendel's contributions to political and religious life in Britain, spurred by his employment in 1904 as director of studies at George Cadbury's Woodbrooke Settlement in Birmingham, an educational institution open to people of all genders, age, nationality and denomination. Whether it is on Rendel's tenure at Woodbrooke, his presidency of the Free Churches or his and Helen's commitment to the relief of Armenians during the genocide, Falcetta has extensively employed the Rendel Harris archives and a plethora of unpublished correspondence from other theologians of the period to offer a comprehensive account of a colourful career during the period of academic professionalisation in British theology. While the biography would clearly have benefited from less narrative history (at points it reads like a transcription of a diary) and more contextual analysis, its careful research and attention to detail will be of importance to those interested in the development of theology, religion and education in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century.