This could have been a poor book, or at least a middling one. Not because of the writer, but because the conceit sounds as if it could be woeful: yet another lengthy fossicking around our country by a journalist to find out who we are and how we got here, this time under the spurious excuse of necessity in the year of the Jubilee and Olympics. Messrs Marr, Paxman, Maconie and Bryson have all sought and failed to find the "soul" of Britain, albeit with high degrees of insight and humour: what was another trawl going to reveal?

But it's terrific. Mark Easton, home editor of BBC News, has given us the very opposite of what could have been a lazy rehash. With wisdom and skill and, crucially, access to authentic stories behind the political machinations of the past 20 years of public life, he has delivered 26 alphabetically-headed chapters  J is for justice, T is for toilet, G is for grass (a grand chapter, this)  that are all well-written and full of surprises.

So, for instance, we learn that the way we in Britain behave when drunk has astonishingly little to do with how much we've drunk, how strong it was or how inherently rude or violent we are. It's all cultural conditioning, a fact attested by a slew of international studies that help explain how in French/Spanish cafe culture, say, they can put away just as much as us without trying to rip off the barmaid's skirt or lamp her boyfriend. In one short chapter Easton manages to pull the rug from under decades of kneejerk political reaction and tabloid panic, just by doing his research and talking sense.

As he does with, for instance, knives, immigration and poverty, or how in recent times an "apology" has morphed from a genuine acknowledgment of culpability to essentially spreading blame. And there are a good few slightly less serious chapters  umbrellas, silly hats (those two done in depth to explore, of course, our histories of weather-watching and eccentricity). He comes with no discernible political agenda but seems to be simply seeking to set straight lazy thinking.

The wit, when it comes, is tinder-dry; the writing may not be quite as fluid or laugh-out-loud as Bryson's, but whose is? And he gives us, along with some eye-popping insights into the cynicism of politicians and their spinners, and all those diligently mined studies from around the world, some delightful expositions on everything from the Easterlin paradox to why rustic Britain's historical geometry has abhorred straight lines.

It's rare that a book can both sit in the loo waiting for a happy random rummage yet be destined for a permanent place on one's reference shelves: this is one.