I am not quite sure why this is called Secret Britain. It could be called anything suggesting a miscellany of curiosities. Presumably it is to pique the interest of a nosy public. Anyway, it doesn't really matter. It's an endlessly fascinating book, and dull would he or she be who didn't find it hard to put down, once picked up.

Justin Pollard has had the clever idea of presenting us with roughly 150 bizarre episodes from British history, cases of fraud, criminality, bad luck, romantic disaster, derring-do, outrageous wagers . . . well, you name it. At a couple of pages or so for each story, none outstays its welcome, and Pollard tells them economically and with unostentatious but beguiling wit.

I wonder if it is deliberate that the first section, "Secret Games", contains the most familiar tales  that of the Cottingley Fairies, photographs which fooled (among others) the sadly gullible Conan Doyle; of "Scratching Fanny", in which a supposed murder victim communicated from within her coffin (and was exposed by, among others, Samuel Johnson); of the Berners Street hoax, in which 4,000 assorted tradesmen called at 54 Berners Street on a November day in 1809; of the woman from Guildford who claimed to keep giving birth to rabbits; and of Piltdown Man, which has become such a byword for fraud that you might wonder whether the story ever need be told again.

Then again, it is important that these tales continue to be told, lest we forget, and there is a great deal here that appears to have nearly disappeared from the record. Some of it literally has; take the poignant case of "Gentle Johnny" Ramensky, who, although refusing ever to use violence when undertaking his bank robberies (he was an expert "peterman", or safe-blower), spent two-thirds of his life in prison, despite, or because of, being very good at escaping from them, if only for a short while. Released from prison during the second world war in the hope that his talents would help the war effort behind enemy lines  a justified hope, as it turned out  he wrote his memoirs, only for the manuscript to be impounded and destroyed, on the grounds that he had signed the Official Secrets Act. "So the only part of Ramensky's life that he wished to be made public will now forever remain secret, whilst the vast majority of his nefarious life, which he wished to keep quiet, is today public information." (There is a poignant coda: his lawyer, not a job one would charitably wish on anyone, was in fact the tartan trouser-wearing eccentric and bon vivant Nicholas Fairbairn QC; he described Ramensky's life as a quest "to break into whatever he was out of and out of whatever he was inside".)

And so on. Among the accounts of disaster or ill fortune there are nuggets of cheer, such as the small number of villages called "Thankful Villages" with no memorials to the dead of the first world war, because everyone they sent out came back alive (only one such village exists in France, which rather puts a damper on things). The whole book is a more or less random portrait of the country, and all the more enjoyable for its randomness. (I find it a slight pity that John Aubrey, who pioneered this kind of work, and about whom one or two odd tales have been told, doesn't rate a mention here. But this is the tiniest of quibbles.) Why is the story of "Gentle Johnny" placed directly after that of the secret drawer of John Dee, when three and a half centuries separate them? Perhaps because Dee's occult papers were hidden in a secret compartment in a chest, and Johnny Ramensky liked to retrieve the contents of safes . . . it doesn't matter. Pollard, in his introduction, says: "You can read some or all of it in any order  it makes no real difference  and take each story as seriously or as lightly as you may. It is," he winningly adds, "the literary equivalent of a box of chocolates." The really clever part is the tone, which is never facetious, always respectful to the subject matter, even when there is a faintly detectable Jeevesian smile to the prose. It is hard not to say: "Oh, just one more, then."