‘Given a certain lapse of time,’ writes Graham Robb in this exhilarating chronicle of Britain, ‘all history is wrong, including the histories which correct the erroneous histories.’ This is a healthy attitude for a historian to have and sits well with Robb’s method, which makes room for ‘the surprising contractions, dilations and reversals of time’. The Discovery of Britain begins in 2018, with the author and his wife returning from a French cycling expedition to find the island of Britain effectively cut in half as a result of the devastation wrought by Storm Ali (Robb typically explores his terrain on two wheels, as in his classic The Discovery of France). Later that day, Robb had the idea for a history of the British Isles for which he would gather evidence from ‘natives, nomads, invaders and immigrants, the mighty and the impotent, the blindingly famous and the utterly obscure’.

To this list of sources, Robb adds himself. Scenes from his own life enliven the narrative effectively. He describes the Worcestershire village of Powick, where he spent some of his early years, as a ‘time-muddled landscape’ in which the present coexisted with strange remnants of a deeper past and ‘every weekday morning, an assortment of rural types left the pages of Anglo-Saxon and medieval history and processed along the road’. As a boy, he and his pals built dens in a huge, ancient hedge bank, which he later discovered was just a stone’s throw from a secret nuclear bunker.

As its subtitle suggests, The Discovery of Britain takes in a vast sweep of time, although the focus is of course on the recorded history of Britain – little more than thirty lifetimes, as Robb points out (and a little over eighty lifetimes would take us all the way back