Didn't we all love the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics? And didn't we all hate the closing ceremony? There was a reason for this: the opening ceremony was actually more coherent than it seemed, because it was underpinned by intellectual foundations  namely, Pandæmonium. The screenwriter and children's author Frank Cottrell Boyce, who worked with Danny Boyle on the ceremony, gave him a copy of this book early on in the project, and its ideas percolated, with splendid results, into the finished result. (In his excellent foreword, Boyce writes: "When I first held this book in my hand, I swear I could feel it shaking with its own internal energy.")

Something of an obsessive labour of love, Pandæmonium is a compilation of writings from 1660  specifically, the section in Book I of Paradise Lost in which Milton describes the building of the capital city of Hell  to 1886, describing, as the subtitle of the book puts it, "the coming of the machine as seen by contemporary observers". This is, you might think upon reading it, putting it rather loosely: for although reading accounts of smoke-belching chimneys will remind you of certain moments in the ceremony, you might find yourself both regretting, and understanding, that no reference was made on the night to "the great gogle [sic] eyed beetle", whose relationship to the "machine" is suggestive rather than explicit. (There are other minute natural descriptions here: the point, I imagine, is to subtly emphasise the discoveries of the microscope, as well as the general notion of scientific inquiry.)

This edition  which represents about one third of the original text  is the work of Humphrey Jennings, the great film-maker who died in 1950. You might have seen A Diary for Timothy and Fires Were Started, wartime films which, although commissioned with propagandist intent, have none of the vicious emptiness of propaganda, but are beautiful works in their own right. Pandæmonium is similarly full of wonder, although Jennings, for the most part, takes a back seat, letting his parade of impressions tell their own story. Every so often he steps in, as after a description of a Derby silk mill, given by someone who was a child labourer there: "The abstract horror of this image derives in part from the unspoken acknowledgment of the truth that as far as the 18th-century poor were concerned, 1 the factory, 2 the school, 3 the workhouse, 4 the prison, were all the same building."

I have it from more than one reliable source that a cabinet minister wailed to Boyle that the ceremony was "not Tory enough", and there are times when this book seems to have a political agenda: I defy you to read the eye-witness description of the Peterloo massacre without weeping with indignation. You may also note Darwin, troubled by the theological implications of his work on evolution: "I had no intention to write atheistically. But ... I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice." (I like the way that "Caterpillars" are, like God, granted a capital letter.) But there is a multitude of voices here, and delight as well as revulsion or mystification. Coleridge acknowledges Newton's genius, although says "I believe the souls of 500 Sir Isaac Newtons would go the making up of a Shakespeare or a Milton." Another writer marvels at the new invention, the train, which can carry passengers at an unprecedented 20 miles per hour.

In short, this is nothing less than a one-volume history of modern Britain. It is extraordinary how Jennings managed to turn a concatenation of accounts, from names both famous and obscure, into something that has such power. It's a question of momentum, perhaps; like a film, as Jennings himself said, about "the place of imagination in the making of the modern world". Jennings's daughter, Mary-Louise, in her excellent introduction, implies that the book should be read in order. Jennings himself was more relaxed.