This is a wide-ranging, informative, but ultimately slightly frustrating book. It represents the first book-length account of Martin Folkes, the only man to become president of both the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries, a distinction that, as the author tells us in her acknowledgements, was what drew her to her subject in the first place. Previous authors had been discouraged by the apparent lack of source material, since Folkes directed on his death that his papers should be destroyed. Anna Marie Roos, however, has been able to do much to rectify this state of affairs. Thus she uses materials auctioned at Sotheby’s in 1932, some of which subsequently turned up on book barrows in the Farringdon Road, whence they were retrieved by the late R.E.W. Maddison and subsequently presented to the Royal Society, while others were acquired directly by the Royal Society itself and by the Wellcome Library. She has also been able to trace letters in the collections of such of Folkes’s correspondents as Henry Baker and Charles Lennox, 2nd Duke of Richmond, and more scattered materials that survive in repositories like the Norfolk Record Office and the Bodleian Library – in the latter case, the travel journal that Folkes kept while he was on a tour on the continent in 1733–5, an episode on which Roos wrote an informative article in the British Journal for the History of Science in 2017 that forms a significant component of the current book.