The English — things are different in Wales, Scotland and Ireland — are bad with dates. The public lives of other countries revolve around the anniversaries of revolutions, wars and liberations. History doesn’t cut so deep in England. I suspect, for instance, that fewer than half the people reading this review know why June 18 matters (Waterloo day, and also the day on which Churchill gave his “finest hour” speech).

Stephen Pollard’s book revolves around dates, but these are not the conventional “turning points” that might be identified by a political historian. There is no reference to the Suez crisis of 1956 or to “Bloody Sunday’”in 1972. Instead, he picks dates that he associates with some more subtle and long-term change.The arrival of the Empire Windrush, the ship bringing immigrants from Jamaica, on June 22, 1948, kicks off a discussion of immigration; the fatwa against Salman Rushdie on February 14, 1989 provides the occasion for an essay on Britain and “Jihadist Islam”; the dangers of cultural subsidies from the state are discussed in a chapter that begins with the foundation of the Arts Council on August 9, 1946.

Some historians might object that this attention to dates is naive and antiquarian. Things rarely change on a single day. The abolition of the grammar schools, to take the most obvious example from Pollard’s book, did not really happen because schools were “injected with a dose of poison” when Tony Crosland ordered local authorities to organise education along comprehensive lines on July 12, 1965. Grammar schools were abolished only slowly and the education secretary who presided over the largest number of abolitions was actually Margaret Thatcher, between 1970 and 1974.

Personally, however, I would have liked a bit more “antiquarianism”. This book illustrates the dangers of history written by someone with no interest in the past. Pollard repeatedly uses a date as an excuse for a journalistic essay about the evils of modern British society. He expends such indignation on sexual ­promiscuity, declining educational standards and the inability of modern housewives to make toad-in-the-hole that he has no energy left to think about how, say, the 1950s were different from the present. The chapter on the execution on January 28, 1953 of Derek Bentley, the brain-damaged burglar hanged for being an accessory to the killing of a policeman, is an example of the missed opportunities here. We get hardly any flavour of Bentley’s character. What was it like to grow up in wartime London (Bentley’s house was bombed twice)? What was it like to leave a secondary-modern school without having learnt to read or write? How did he react to his sentence? Did he know what was going on?

More generally, the Bentley case might have been used to try to reconstruct the culture that went with capital punishment. Why did so many people regard hanging as natural? Why did members of the Establishment change their minds, and why was the British public so reluctant to follow them? George Orwell’s famous 1931 essay captured what it was like to participate in a hanging. Pollard gives none of the revealing grisly details. We do not hear about the black cap being placed on the judge’s head: it was said that Lord Justice Goddard (the old monster who sentenced Bentley) had enjoyed reciting the death sentence when he was at school. We do not hear about the table with which hangmen calculated how much rope they needed — enough to break the neck, but not so much that it would rip the head off.

Pollard gives us none of this. A real conservative — Roger Scruton, say — might draw an interesting essay out of the Bentley case, arguing that the death penalty underpins all proper sense of right and wrong and that we must accept its horrors if we are not to descend into moral ­anarchy. So far as I can tell, Pollard doesn’t believe that hanging retarded young men is a good thing. It is hard to see, therefore, what link there is between the case and a chapter about the liberal ­attitudes towards crime and punishment that allegedly dominate modern Britain.

Often Pollard is just wrong. The invention of the microwave on October 8, 1945 is said to have ruined British cooking — but anyone who has read Elizabeth David’s Mediterranean Food (1950) will be sceptical about the idea that there ever was a golden age of British cooking. The chapter that is ostensibly about Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (published on October 24, 1970) is utter tosh. How could a book that was read mainly by sweet young women at New Hall and St Hugh’s be responsible for the rising number of pregnancies among teenagers on council estates? Greer’s book did not produce a sexual revolution — although it did bring about a small cultural counter-revolution, because it helped Carmen Callil found Virago and consequently bring all those beautifully written books by Rosamond Lehmann and Molly Keane back into circulation.

The best chapter concerns the royal family and the humiliating spectacle of Prince Edward’s It’s a Royal Knockout (June 15, 1987). Pollard sees this as marking the monarchy’s transition from “dignity” to “tawdriness”. He is funny about the sheer awfulness of Edward and shrewd about the dangers of the royal family’s flirtation with the mass media. But I think that even the most Cromwellian republican among us might — on reading Pollard’s description of Prince Charles’s public statements as “the inappropriate rantings of a singularly ignorant bore” — feel that the words “pot” and “kettle” come to mind.

Ten Days that Changed the Nation by Stephen Pollard
Simon & Schuster £10.99 pp256

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