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Hannah Malone, Architecture, Death and Nationhood: Monumental Cemeteries of Nineteenth-Century Italy; Routledge (London, 2017), 278 pp. incl. 118 bw ISBN: 9781472446817; £95

and vestments. Whyte shows an enjoyable fascination with the angry polemic of ‘disgusted of Yarnton’, whose censoriousness inadvertently reveals the purposes of these newly restored practices. Less clear is who these fulminators were, and why they resisted the newVictorian way. The Greek Revival architect Alexander Thomson is briefly quoted, although the intellectual depth of his objection to the Gothic could have been allowed more scope; as a Glaswegian Presbyterian, he might be expected to protest, but as Whyte shows, sacramental Gothicism eventually appealed to all denominations, even in Scotland. Those Evangelicals and Nonconformists who resisted were not, as Whyte clearly indicates, a relic of Georgian indifference holding out against a tide of enthusiasm, but presumably formed a newly re-emerging tradition of their own, equally motivated by earnest faith. In the last chapter, the debate is extended to the twentieth-century liturgical movement and modern church architecture, andWhyte sees its iconoclasm as fundamentally Victorian, since the church building is still granted a power to ‘speak’ and to influence its occupants’ religious values, and therefore may be dangerous if not properly edifying. The liturgical movement was certainly sacramental, often appealing to High Church Anglicans such as Gresham Kirkby, the vicar of Bow Common. But it is simplistic to call it merely a ‘change in taste’: arguably it was historically a really new idea taking effect in and from an altogether altered social and political situation. The publishers seem convinced that the book will have popular appeal, so they have packaged it in an accessible format, which has encouraged Whyte to indulge in the occasional humorous aside, preserving the liveliness of the lecture series from which it originates. Yet this is a serious scholarly project, which explicitly shows its debt throughout to recent work by others and presents much new and original research of its own. It deserves to be considered not only by historians of church buildings, but more widely as a refreshing model of architectural history writing that dispenses with dry technicalities and connoisseurship in favour of an engaging and lucidly historical approach.