If Ben Elton ever writes another series of Blackadder, Reprobates ought to be top of his research list. Not because John Stubbs offers a daringly revisionist take on the English civil war. The book's subtitle notwithstanding, the war occupies rather fewer than a quarter of its nearly 500 pages. What we do get, though, is a colourful braiding of poetry criticism, literary biography and social and political history  the whole lot knotted together by characters of such effervescent high spirits the sitcom form might have been invented for them.

Rik Mayall would be a shoo-in for Sir John Suckling  a cad, a card-cheat (he invented the game of Cribbage), and the altogether scandalous nephew of what today's tabloids would call a shamed chancellor. And then there is Shakespeare's godson, Sir William Davenant, a poet and dramaturge, a dashing secret agent (he once offered his services to the privy council, vowing to revenge England's defeat at Ré the previous year by blowing up the French arsenal at Dunkirk), and a man who lost his nose thanks to an overdose of the mercury doctors then prescribed for syphilis. Surely only that dandy high Tory Peter Cook could (if only he were still with us) properly incarnate this reprobate's Cavalier attitudes.

We use that phrase negatively, of course, but the great virtue of Stubbs's book is to remind you how attractive and aspirational arrogant self-certitude can be. To be sure, Reprobates pays more attention to the puritans than its title suggests  Hobbes, Milton and George Herbert are all given their due  but like many a storyteller before him, Stubbs knows the devil has the best lines. His prose comes most alive when his men are behaving badly. Good post-enlightenment liberals might know in their hearts that the Cavalier royalists were romantic but wrong, but Reprobates reminds us how the roundheads were if not exactly right but repulsive then certainly right but repressive.

Well, some of them anyway. For all of the knockabout fun of its set pieces, Reprobates contrives too to subtly undermine our binary take on its era. There were, we learn, roundheads who liked to dress up (though unlike their more swashing counterparts, they always settled their tailoring bills), just as there were royalists who thought long hair and silken garb absurd and effete. And what was Charles I if not a pious and austere workaholic?

There are similarly eye-opening facts and thoughts on pretty much every page of this fine book. True, its emphasis on literary esoterica means it can't be recommended as the ideal introduction to mid-17th-century England. But Messrs Elton and Blackadder could surely turn it into one.