In Churchill's Shadow: Confronting The Past In Modern Britain by David Cannadine

Look into Churchill's multi-faceted career, and you see imperial Britain in transition. Gordon Marsden is still dazzled

Essays are written for a plethora of reasons; occasions when their afterlife improves in book form are rarer. Here, though, David Cannadine triumphantly delivers added value by obeying E M Forster's dictum: "only connect". These essays cover the span of Churchill's long life (1874-1965), ranging over individuals and institutions in a way Winston (whose hinterland as historian, artist and bricklayer was imperial) would surely have approved.

Cannadine shows, as in earlier books on the British aristocracy and empire, that he is a master of the telling detail and turn of phrase. He connects them to the large themes of heritage, class and national identity with the same vitality as the late Raphael Samuel.

Zeitgeist is a much overused word, but Cannadine evokes it sharply here. It shines out in the essay on Westminster's "Palace of Varieties", with those early Victorian postmodernists Barry and Pugin creating a "new old building ... instantly antique and self-consciously historical".

The celebration of Crown and Lords in gold and crimson evolved via frescoes and fittings into a new imperial self-image. Even in the postwar refurbishment of the bombed-out Commons, that symbolism lingered: a replica chamber of Victorian size (at Churchill's insistence) with wood from the Dominions. Its apotheosis is Westminster Hall, where Churchill, the great commoner, lay in state.

Cannadine's sense of place is nowhere more acute than in sparkling essays on the Chamberlains and Stanley Baldwin. As a son of Birmingham, he fittingly explains how "Radical Joe" metamorphosed into an imperial proconsul. To make Baldwin a figure of fascination is a challenge, but Cannadine achieves it: an understanding of Middle England in all senses.

He sets Baldwin, the consummate anti-politics politician, into his cultural context: an interwar England fearful of the "isms" of Continental Europe, taking refuge in the pastoralism of the National Trust, the music of Vaughan Williams and the novels of Baldwin's fellow Worcester man, Francis Brett Young.

Few historians could make connections between politics and culture as elegantly as Cannadine does with essays on Gilbert and Sullivan, Noel Coward and James Bond that reflect the recessional of imperial Britain. That on Coward is particularly fine in rescuing the Master from his own smokescreen of frivolity. Cannadine's high-politics counterparts are the "heroic egotists and outsiders": Chamberlain, Churchill and Thatcher, whose late-career crusades against national decline ultimately failed to convert sentiment into a lasting structure.

Churchill hovers over the book like Banquo's ghost, but also bestrides it in the essays on his strengths, weaknesses and contradictions. Cannadine reminds us in "Churchill and Monarchy" that, besotted by the institution as Winston was, he was never overawed by its individuals. Born in a Vanbrugh palace, given his obsequies in a Wren cathedral, Churchill (like Marlborough before him) had lived a grander life than any 20th-century British monarch. And great though Churchill's rhetoric was, bombast on everything from Bolshevism to the Indian Empire brought diminishing returns when he thundered against Hitler's "gathering storm". Cannadine quotes Herbert Samuel's 1935 remarks: "When the Rt Hon Gentleman speaks, the House always crowds in to hear him. It listens and admires ... but it remains unconvinced." Thankfully the boy who had cried wolf too often finally became the lion of the "Finest Hour" in 1940: "It was a nation ... that had the lion heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar."

We are all creatures of our times. As one who, as an 11-year-old, saw his magical funeral on black-and-white television, and spent 12 years editing History Today (founded by Churchill's devoted acolyte Brendan Bracken), I am susceptible to the Churchill evoked here as a Janus-faced diamond illuminating his imperial age. But what Cannadine has done is no reverential exercise. His book reaches out with historical questions about identity and experience – not least for those in the 21st century whose sense of both may be in short supply.

Gordon Marsden is MP for Blackpool South and edited 'Victorian Values: Personalities and Perspectives in 19th-Century Society' (Addison Wesley Longman)