This country, it has often been observed, seems to have provided a disproportionately enormous amount of entertainment that is hugely popular around the globe. Let’s start, as the book does on its front cover (the design referencing the back cover of Abbey Road), with the Beatles; then there is the enduring popularity of Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie, Doctor Who, the Rolling Stones, James Bond, David Bowie, Alfred Hitchcock …

This is a tricky one, though. It’s a great premise, and I dived into, and splashed around in, this book gleefully at first. Here were lucid and often amusing expositions on the work of Lennon and McCartney, Ian Fleming, JRR Tolkien, Christie (although I skimmed through the bits on her rapidly: Sandbrook warns us that there are spoilers, ie murderers revealed, and I am right in the middle of The Murder at the Vicarage). His exasperation at the gulf between Lennon’s cupidity and the lugubrious piety of Imagine is instructive and funny; and the case he makes for Tolkien is plausible and instructive – I hadn’t picked up on the parallels between Gollum and Cain, for instance. (Or, when dealing with the Harry Potter books, between Potter and TH White’s The Once and Future King.)

However, there is a problem with this book, and it is that Sandbrook, while an extremely engaging historian, seems to be operating to a simple agenda. So while he inclines to the view that Patrick McGoohan’s 1960s TV show The Prisoner was made up as it went along, and notices the way it portrays a kind of nightmare Butlins and expresses a yearning for individual freedom – he doesn’t quite join these dots, or say where he is going with it (for example: exploring the love/hate relationship we have with our institutions). We do not, by the end of the book, have any explanation as to why these islands are so good at popular culture. There are also some mysterious inclusions. Do we need a dozen pages on Billy Bunter? Or so much on John Braine? Or Flashman?

Of course, any book that deals with popular British culture is going to have to take in the fact that two of our most popular artistes are Andrew Lloyd Webber and Elton John. Sandbrook grasps these nettles bravely, paying particular attention to John’s courage in coming out, which possibly changed more attitudes in Britain than even Bowie’s calculated flirtation with bisexuality and androgyny.

In his books on Britain in the 1950s and 60s, Sandbrook has covered some of this ground before. But he doesn’t repeat himself, and his scope is wider than heretofore – he notices, for instance, how ingrained Charles Dickens’s influence is, still, in popular entertainment. (And, at the other end of the timescale, salutes the success of Grand Theft Auto.) But this started me thinking about something that was missing, contemporaneous with Dickens: surely a book calling itself The Great British Dream Factory that deals with the most popular and enduring national cultural artefacts and yet doesn’t mention the Alice books has fallen at a rather crucial hurdle. After all, they are the spring of a powerful current of British surrealism, and the best indicator of how powerfully weird the British imagination can be. One can only speculate as to the reasons for their omission. So here’s my speculation: Sandbrook doesn’t like the books. Nor do they fit into his theories, having little to do with class or (anti-)intellectual snobbery. (He likes poking fun at intellectuals.)

Well, nobody and nothing is perfect. There are after all 550 pages before we get to the notes, on subjects about which everyone has opinions. It would be impossible to please everyone. But when Sandbrook is pleasing, he is very pleasing indeed.