In 1848, the tumultuous year of European revolution and of the first publication of Marx and Engels's The Communist Manifesto, the French composer Hector Berlioz arrived in an agitated London. To many in the capital, the Chartist movement  the first mass working-class movement in Britain  seemed on the brink of erupting into full-blown revolt, and armed confrontation with government forces appeared inevitable. Looking around him, Berlioz dismissed these fears with Gallic disdain: the Chartists, he shrugged, knew "as much about starting a riot as the Italians about writing a symphony".

Frank McLynn's new book is the latest in a number of recent works dealing with revolt and rebellion in English history, a trend that undoubtedly reflects our own preoccupation with current events. His very first sentence acknowledges two of the most well-received, David Horspool's The English Rebel and Edward Vallance's A Radical History of Britain. McLynn's aim here is different from both. Britain, so the truism goes, has never undergone a genuine revolution  that is to say, the overthrow of an entire system  but it has experienced times of revolutionary possibility. Rather than give us a history of protest, McLynn identifies seven "revolutionary moments" in English, and later British, history: moments in which the country has trembled on the brink of seismic change.

These moments are in themselves familiar enough: the 1381 peasants' revolt, the pilgrimage of grace of the 1530s  about as much a pilgrimage as the glorious revolution was revolutionary  and the one time when, many would argue, Britain did in fact go through a genuine age of revolution: the English civil war and commonwealth of the mid-17th century. But in setting out to anatomise each of these moments, in order to work out why in the end they failed to lead to revolution, McLynn has set himself an ambitious task.

It's one that finds the idea of revolution in some unlikely places. Perhaps the most intriguing sections are those in which he explores the revolutionary possibilities of the Jacobite rebellion. When in 1745 Charles Edward Stuart (aka Bonnie Prince Charlie) attempted to overthrow the Hanoverian state in favour of a restored Stuart dynasty, his Jacobite manifesto blended monarchism with the threatened overthrow of financial capitalism and a pledge to found something along the lines of a proto-welfare state ("We shall take under the protection of the state the children of poor parents."). Whether, however, this was any more than opportunistic populism on Charles Edward's part will never be known.

McLynn also offers some trenchant observations on the British tendency for compromise rather than radical change: "the two-party system," he notes, "has led to party machines making a mockery of democratic representation and the bizarre phenomenon of prime ministers with more formal powers than Roman emperors." He is robust on the failure of Ramsay MacDonald's Labour party to offer any more than token support for workers during the general strike, dispensing "truisms and bromides" instead of putting forward concrete proposals that "might alleviate the plight of the social groups they were supposed to be representing".

Other episodes from the same era continue to resonate, such as the comments of Sir Adam Nimmo, chairman of the Scottish Coal Owners' Association, who, in the mid-1920s, stated flatly that the competitiveness of the British coal industry precluded discussion of what working miners "may call a living wage". "It is of no avail," he continued pompously, "to suggest that the wages received do not permit of miners having a proper standard of living." When asked to reveal details of his own income, Nimmo's Olympian hauteur promptly dissolved in bellowed denunciations of his interlocutors' "impertinence" and "irrelevance".

But, as McLynn points out, defining "revolutionary moments" is no straightforward matter  especially when dealing with revolutions that, according to most standard definitions, don't actually take place  and as a result his account can at times feel both curiously evasive and rigidly prescriptive. Evasive, in that the book doesn't really tackle head-on the issue of England, and later Britain's, exceptionalism; prescriptive because, throughout, he attempts to wrestle his subjects into particular categories of revolutionary behaviour, and consequently seems in a state of perpetual disappointment at their failure to be so strong-armed. Discussing Jack Cade's rebellion of 1450, one of the key moments in England's long decline into the civil conflict later known as the wars of the roses, McLynn regrets its "limited consciousness and lack of imagination"  in other words, it fails to fit his definition of what revolution should constitute.

As Eric Hobsbawm once put it, "being a revolutionary in countries such as ours just happens to be difficult." Why this should be so is the question McLynn's book sets out to explore but doesn't fully answer. What it does tell us is that Berlioz was at least partly wrong: throughout history the English and British knew perfectly well how to start riots  they just didn't, for the most part, know how to convert them into revolutions.

 Thomas Penn's Winter King is published by Penguin.