One of the tasks of the Secretariat for Non-believers is to study the diverse forms of atheism. It has not been easy to do this in Britain for lack of studies which map out the field. Now with Varieties of Unbelief Dr. Susan Budd has filled the gap. A literate sociologist, she has put us all in her debt by examining the minute-books and records of the various secularist societies. Her work is another contribution to the ‘sociology of the past’ which is indispensable if we are to understand the present. It occupies, as she puts it, the wasteland ‘between the tilled and fertile plantations of the sociology of collective behaviour and the history of ideas’ (p. 1). Such is her almost superhuman objectivity that it is quite impossible to determine from the book where she stands: her story takes her down some fascinating by-ways of English eccentricity (thus Annie Besant managed to remain a secularist and a theoso-phist to the bafflement of everyone except herself), but she stays resolutely cool and tries to resist the temptations of irony. Though she is prepared gently to chide her secularists for their repeated attacks on citadels long abandoned by the religious, she clearly admires them for their independence of mind and rejection of compromise, and can speak of them as ‘heirs to a great tradition, to the continued vitality of a radical culture which exists outside established methods of thought’ (p.80). But her tone is so very different from the propagandists of secularism whose account of the ‘great tradition’ tends to enrol Erasmus (a Catholic) and Voltaire (a deist) and indeed anyone who has in any way contributed to human progress. To the secularist, the world is full of ‘anonymous secularists’ who would reveal themselves if only they knew better.