A couple of weeks ago, in a review of a book about the Seventies, Ian Jack, the former editor of Granta, noted that the fashion for slicing up history into 10- year periods, "each of them crudely flavoured and differently coloured, like a tube of wine gums", is a relatively recent phenomenon, and a stupidly distorting one at that. In his childhood, "the 20th century lay stacked in broad layers of time: dark moorland where glistened an occasional white milestone marked with a year and an event. Sometimes the events were large and public. The General Strike happened in 1926 and Germany invaded Poland in 1939. But often they were small and private. In my own family, 1944 wasn't remembered for D-Day but as 'the summer we went along the Roman Wall on the tandem'."

I read this and smiled. At the time, I'd just finished The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain, a collection of Jack's journalism from 1989-2009, and thus was keenly aware of several other key dates in the author's life. Take 1956, the year that John Osborne's play, Look Back In Anger, opened at London's Royal Court and changed all sorts of things. In a short but wonderfully wry piece about British food, Jack notes that 1956 was the year in which he and his parents ate their first "tin of baked beans that also included sausages", a meal taken while sheltering from the rain beneath a bridge at Lanercost Priory, near Hadrian's Wall. "My," said his father, "but this is good!"

Jack would never wrap a decade neatly in cellophane, nor even, I imagine, a month or a week  and this is the great thing about his journalism, and all his writing: the way that he handles time. He is up there with a fiction writer such as Alice Munro in his grasp of its ebb and flow, his awareness that its strong but rapidly changing currents often leave us wondering not only what we can remember, but what we should.

When it comes to investigation, his usual method, whether he is prodding tirelessly at the Hatfield railway crash or remembering the great Kathleen Ferrier, is to use the past, rigorously unpicked, as a torch: shine its beam on the present and you will not only understand the here and now a little better; you may even, if you are lucky, get some kind of a steer on the future.

This can result in that unfashionable thing, sentiment. Jack is more than usually aware of what we have lost, from old cinemas to industrial brick chimneys. But mostly, he is too beady and sceptical a writer to view the world through a veil of ersatz tears. Even better, unlike Gordon Brown and all those other politicians who long to define "Britishness", Jack's strong hunch is that there is nothing wrong with being unable to do so. An identity that is untethered and which, in his case, springs from a thousand fragments including the Beano, the novels of Alan Sillitoe and a certain kind of drop scone is not necessarily a bad thing. Better that than bombast and lies. 

All of which is not to suggest that The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain advances some kind of thesis. It doesn't and for this reason, its title, which is, I think, a little clunky and mean, is the only thing I dislike about it. The pieces here, it is true, are joined by Jack's very particular sense of place, but they are also disparate: separate pieces of jewellery, rather than pearls on a string. Some will regard the book's beating heart as "The 12.10 to Leeds", an angry and precise dissection of the criminal stupidities of railway privatisation, but I prefer (my low tolerance for gauge corners and other engineering speak is entirely my own failing) another longish piece, "Klever Kaff", which whisks the reader straight back to a time when celebrity had nothing at all to do with weekly magazines and their predisposition to cellulite (thank God: Heat would have made mincemeat of Kathleen Ferrier, who was big-boned and a healthy eater).

Jack's account of the life of the Blackburn contralto, an ordinary woman, and an extraordinary one, is an exceptionally deft piece of writing. It is not so much that one learns anything new about Ferrier; it's the compression of detail that works on you. He tells us, among many other things, that Passing Clouds was her favourite brand of cigarettes and that, before she was famous and still married to a bank manager called Albert, it "began to be noticed that the Wilsons [her married name] produced no children". In adding what another writer might leave out, it is as though he has clicked on a light, sepia switching suddenly to colour.

As subjects go, Ferrier is, I suppose, rather "relevant" (dread word) and I seem to recall that in another column, one uncollected here, Jack compared her death from cancer, an illness that was hidden from public view, with that of Jade Goody from the same disease. But he also thinks she is interesting for her own sake. Which she is. In his book, there are lots of things that are interesting for their own sake. Why are cherries no longer so cherryish? (Jack loves cherries, but he misses their old Kentish sharpness.) Why do little girls like dolphins, especially when ponies are, well, so much more accessible?

A delectable pair of essays devote themselves to cigarettes. The first, "Addicted", is about JM Barrie's novel, My Lady Nicotine, a plotless story about a bachelor who must swap smoking for a new wife. The second, "Cured", is about Jack's love affair with the fags, a sort of potted memoir by way of Gold Leaf, Benson & Hedges and Marlboro Lights. Teenager, newspaper subeditor, writer: a cigarette was a considerable help when it came to coping with all these states.

He also writes about his parents, who belonged to what he has called the self-improving working classes, with huge feeling and clarity, as if a part of him wonders, still, whether he can really have been so lucky, and so they, too, jump to life. When he writes of his father's keen cinema-going  I won't spoil the story by saying more  I felt a lump in my throat. 

So, a rattle-bag of a book, in spite of its title. Jack was born in 1945, and worked on the Sunday Times in its heyday, under Harry Evans. Later, he edited a new newspaper called the Independent on Sunday. He has been lucky. Much of his writing  though not all, as this volume proves  was written in the best possible circumstances, journalistically speaking, when money and time were less of a luxury than they are now.

The doom merchants who seem actively to long for the end of print should read his book; it may help them finally to understand what such a loss would mean. Almost all of these wonderful pieces were commissioned by newspapers and magazines. They would never have worked, and would not now work, on the internet, which is so very interested in speed and sensation and so resolutely uninterested in well-researched thoughtfulness; in essays on bus conductors and Sundays and the seaside; in all the small, strange things that make us who we are.