In a book of two halves, Jenkins seeks to educate readers in the ‘language’ of style as well as offer a polemic on the ravages visited upon our cities by modernist planners

“My dream is that people’s eyes will be opened instinctively to their surroundings,” says Simon Jenkins at the end of his new book. “I want people to point at buildings, laugh, cry or get angry. I want them to hate and to love what they see. I want them to speak architecture.” So he has written A Short History of British Architecture, which he hopes will help people understand what he calls the “language” of styles – such things as the difference between Doric and Corinthian columns, or between early English and perpendicular gothic.

It turns out to be two books in one. The first 200 pages are a brisk rattle through four-and-a-half millennia of the greatest hits of British building from Stonehenge onwards, talking about cathedrals, country houses and monuments rather than the places of everyday life, delivered with the measured if sometimes opinionated tone of a benign tour guide.