If you like playing that mental parlour game in which you are given a time machine and the choice of which era of history you would care to visit, there might be one factor you'll have overlooked: the existence, or not, of artificial light.

I certainly had not bothered to consider it much until I read this thoroughly engrossing and always well-, and sometimes beautifully written book. But for almost all human history, until at least the early 19th century (and then only in the most advanced cities and towns), nighttime meant darkness  real darkness. Your lights, if you were poor, were lamps powered by animal fat; or fragile rushes, which gave off a feeble light that lasted about an hour. If you lived in Shetland, you stuck the corpse of a petrel, abundantly rich in oils, onto a clay base and threaded a wick down its throat. (I had to read that bit two or three times before I could finally accept it as fact.)

Towns and cities, before they became illuminated, were fearful places in the dark. The authorities mostly decided that anyone out after dark was up to no good and established curfews (from couvre-feu, cover the fire) which it was unwise to break. You were deemed to be a thief if a man, or a prostitute if a woman. Where curfews were more relaxed, blind people were hired to lead people back to their homes at night, on the grounds that they did not need light to navigate their local areas. Sometimes boys with torches were hired instead; it was luck of the draw whether they were affiliated to highwaymen or not.

Brox begins, hauntingly, at the Lascaux caves in south-western France, and she makes us marvel at the achievement of the artists who managed to create such beauty by what could only have been the most primitive lamps. (She returns to Lascaux a couple of hundred pages later, and also at the very end of the book; one might question how tangential the caves are to her story, but so what? This is a book that sheds light  a metaphor that I had hoped to resist. Forgive me.)

I had worried that once Brox's story got to the invention of the electric light bulb, things would become rather more plain sailing, and the story a little boring. But no. When we consider the electric light bulb, romantic notions we might have had about candles or lamps will be tested. I had once, in a mood of wistful primitivism, entertained the idea of using an oil lamp to read by, but now I know how dangerous they are, and how much of an immense faff it is to clean them, I have dropped the notion for ever. And candles aren't what they used to be: they're much, much better, and for most of their life most were difficult to make, and stank. The upside was that if, like the builders of the first Eddystone lighthouse, you got trapped for days in a storm, you could eat them.

Anyway, the relatively high price of this book is vitiated by the fact that pretty much every page has something that makes you go "wow", whether it is the quote from the New Yorker about walking through the moonlit city in the 1965 blackout ("the moonlight lay on the streets like thick snow, and we had a curious, persistent feeling that we were leaving footprints in it"); the news that electrical pioneer Nikola Tesla's skull was so sensitive that he could feel pressure when walking under bridges; or the 1963 experiment by the French geologist Michel Siffre, who spent two months in a cave in order to see how his body clock was affected (it was OK; he nearly lost his mind, though).

One or two reviews have mentioned things that the book overlooks  such as the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900, which gloried in the new light source  and I have a nagging feeling that I could think of something else that's missing, but cannot put my finger on it. Not that this is important, with writing of this quality. On the edging out of gas lamps by steady electric ones: "That flickering was a link to the light at the beginning of human time: the kerosene lamp was the apotheosis of the tallow cupped in limestone at Lascaux, the last self-tended flame."