This book is almost 70 years old. As Pevsner states in the introduction, much about "national identity" is mutable. Many of the characteristics he ascribes to the English in 1955 are no longer part of an international vision of "England," while others have endured.

He makes it quite clear that he's trying to do something (pin down aspects of national identity as expressed artistically) that even the author finds a little suspect. He warns against the recent resurgence of nationalism and (more implicitly) ethnonationalism, and argues that "race" is a "dangerous" way to define national identity. So should one even try to do this? And avoiding narrow, chauvinistic ethnic or racial explanations for national identity, how could we do it?

In the end, he comes down on the factors of language, climate, geography, class structure, and political system as the ones that have determined the Englishness of English art. The visual characters are, essentially, linearity over plasticity; fact over fantasy. These are explored primarily through medieval architecture and 18th/early 19th century painting, with a tiny love letter at the end to modernist architecture and the New Towns of postwar Britain.

What a strange little document. ( )

No one is better qualified than [the author] to undertake this discussion of national characteristics of English art....To draw the contours of this 'geography of art' it is necessary...to look at matters in terms of 'polarities'...Two such polarities are the decorated and the perpendicular styles in architecture – the one all undulating curves and playful spatial rhythms, the other relying entirely on the straight line for its effect of uninterrupted spatial clarity. Any yet, in that both are anti-corporeal, denying volume any part in the performance, both are unmistakably English. This well-illustrated survey of English visual and functional art was described, in its original form, by the Journal of Education as being 'far and away the best of the Reith Lectures so far'.