David Thackeray has written an important and original book which investigates how the Conservative Party evolved and adapted its organisational culture, image and popular appeal in an age of profound political flux and uncertainty. His aim is to explain why a party which appeared to be in real trouble after its debacle in the 1906 election and the twin stalemates of 1910 rose to meet the challenges of post-war society and universal suffrage, and emerged as the dominant force of inter-war politics under Stanley Baldwin. Instead of focusing on high politics, ideology or the mechanics of electioneering, it joins a growing body of scholarship inspired by the ‘New Political History’, and focuses on language and local political culture. The structure of the book is refreshingly straightforward. It is divided into three sections which develop a cogent central argument. The first deals with the Edwardian era, and advances the contrarian reading that Joseph Chamberlain’s policy of Tariff Reform was not in fact an electoral albatross for Unionism after 1906 (contra Green, The Crisis of Conservatism [1994; rev. ante, cx (1995), 950–53], and Trentmann, Free Trade Nation [2008; rev. ante, cxxiv (2009), 477–9]). Rather, it served to inject enthusiasm into grass-roots activist cultures, and inspired the establishment of the Women’s Unionist Tariff Reform Association (WUTRA) under Mary Maxse, which proved to be a more dynamic, partisan and effective electioneering force than the better-known Primrose League. The second section deals with the neglected subject of wartime political culture, contending that the prior development of a female activist base allowed Unionists on one hand to exploit electors’ growing distaste for Victorian-style violent street politics, and, on the other, to guard against the temptation of alliances with rowdy and exclusionary radical-right organisations such as the British Workers League. In 1918, the party’s greater unity, and preparedness pragmatically to accept an enlarged state and a new Irish settlement, also proved telling. In the third section, on inter-war politics, Thackeray demonstrates that Unionist opposition to Socialism was not a monolithic discourse, but was adapted to local circumstances. Where Labour had no base, they were attacked as allies of Bolshevism; where they were ensconced in municipal government, their high spending on the working classes was portrayed as pork-barrel ‘Poplarism’. Moreover, Unionist women’s activism (again proving consistently superior to that of their Labour and Liberal rivals) was further improved by Neville and Annie Chamberlain’s Unionist Women’s Institute and a variety of domestic-centred magazines such as Popular View. These connected with working-class families more successfully than the middle-class ladies of WUTRA had, and gave Baldwin a firm base from 1923 upon which to cement the Unionists as a moderate party of the family who could promote affordable social reform to (in the words of the 1924 campaign poster Round the Fireside) ‘keep the home secure’.