This book is deceptively simple with commendably brief notes included in the text and consisting almost exclusively of book references. It does not take long for Nichols dense style and vocabulary to assert itself, likely to send many students reaching for their dictionaries. The author lectures at Cambridge and is a member of Blackfriars in that University. His analysis of Chesterton is based on his John Paul II Memorial Lectures at Oxford – the first Catholic Lectureship created in the University since the Reformation. The first four Chapters offer an overview of Chesterton’s life identifying some salient intellectual themes including the most characteristic - the Paradox. The second half explores five theological themes: the existence of God, anthropology, Christology, morality, and ecclesiology. En route to Roman Catholicism, he was a significant Anglo-Catholic, who during this time offered serious critiques of Blake, Watts, Browning and Dickens, but his chief works were Heretics and Orthodoxy, which were the nearest he got to writing an Apologia. He became increasingly disturbed at what he saw as “doctrinal minimalism” in Anglicanism especially at the Lambeth Conference of 1920, and he remained a lifelong opponent of Modernism and Liberalism. Following Chesterton’s reception into the Roman Catholic Church in 1922 until his death in 1936 he was still much in demand as a writer and public speaker and, latterly, broadcaster. In short, Chesterton was a very significant Christian thinker but is difficult of access in this book, at least for the humble student, to say nothing of the general reader. Nichols is doubtless very sound in his analysis, although sometimes he unconsciously takes on the guise of a Hagiographer, and the reader is not offered very much in the way of looking critically at his subject and his limitations. A comprehensive and profound study which is worth pursuing even when the going gets hard.