This November the eyes of the world will turn to Glasgow. "Cop26 meeting is last chance, says Alok Sharma as he backs UK's plan for new oil and gas fields," the Observer reported in an interview with the Tory minister in charge. The contradiction in this sentence is all the proof you need of the central themes of Crude Britannia: that Britain's economic prosperity is inextricably linked to oil, and that breaking this link appears a more distant prospect than human extinction.

Journeying through landscapes of rigs and refineries, from the Thames estuary to north-east Scotland, campaigner James Marriott and former Guardian energy editor Terry Macalister interweave history and psychogeography. This is refreshing if not seamless: as the narrative style shifts from reportage to the rhythms of speech and prayer you would find in a David Peace novel, it is easy to mistake stylised prose for casual errors and incomplete sentences – of which, unfortunately, there are several. ...

As the authors say, it's ['Stanlow', by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, 1980] "a premonition" – of the industrial decline and missed opportunities that followed the song's release, when Margaret Thatcher used tax revenues from oil to cushion rising unemployment while placing the North Sea in the hands of international capital. It's a story that is told too rarely, and Marriott and Macalister should be commended for giving it such vivacity.