Arthur Stanley was a good and extraordinary man - influential Churchman, biographer, traveller and historian. Born in 1815, the year of Waterloo, he was sent to Rugby School where Dr Arnold was headmaster. Stanley idolised Arnold (and subsequently wrote his biography), and Arnold exercised a powerful influence on the rest of Stanley's life.

After twenty-two years in Oxford, and seven as a canon of Canterbury, Stanley married Lady Augusta Bruce, queen Victoria’s favourite lady-in-waiting, and was appointed Dean of Westminster. He made the Abbey the national temple and shrine it is today and turned the deanery into a salon whose members included Disraeli, Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning, Dickens, Kingsley and, occasionally, the Queen herself and the Prince of Wales. A leading Broad Churchman, Stanley’s enlightened, liberal views were shaped by his family and Arnold, and given a more vigorous edge by his own combative nature.

To him, Christianity was above all ‘the love of God and man shed abroad in the human heart’. He fought hard to defend the comprehensiveness of the Church of England, and its members’ freedom to hold and follow a variety of beliefs and practices. This embroiled him in the many controversies of the Victorian Church, which John Witheridge analyses with impressively informed clarity. The book is an important and authoritative addition to the scholarship of nineteenth-century Church history.