A 700-page narrative account of developments in literature, music, painting, architecture and the theatre from the Celts to the present day. The scope of the book is truly amazing. Yet it is impossible to avoid a few criticisms. First, it's really a history of the arts in England rather than Britain (Strong pleading that 'the word Britain has been used so often to mean England that its use here seems defensible'). Secondly, while ignorance means I am quite prepared co accept that the thirteenth century was 'an age of images' and to bow to his verdict on the significance of William of Wykeham as a patron, many of Strong's judgements on the modern period seemed designed co make life easy for himself. Hence Wordsworth in The Prelude was spokesman for a whole society, In Memoriam was 'the supreme representative poem of the early Victorian era' and The Waste Land is 'universally acclaimed as the central poem of the entire twentieth century'. Some of his 'entries', like the half sentence on Orwell, are so brief as to be valueless. The real worth of the book lies in the author's longer, more personal and more impassioned appreciations, as of Lord Clark. To explain the 'relevance' of such a book may appear otiose, but Strong is clear that, at a time of globalisation and ever-increasing speed, we in this country need a rock to cling to: 'That should be provided by a mutual celebration regardless of class, colour or creed, of the island's achievements in the arts and of those aspects of them which have set us apart.'

The final section of the book is wonderful: a lament for what has been lost in the face of populism, mass culture, and dumbing down. The reader cannot fail to be unmoved by the loss of high cultural values and a sense of cultural history and continuity in the new populist, uneducated, Britain.