Some parts of the book, then, are based on profound scholarship and sharp critical analysis. Some are vigorous, accessible and of great interest to anyone who thinks history matters. Trouble is, they're not the same parts, and almost none of Our Shadowed Present displays both kinds of virtue simultaneously. It isn't, bluntly, a Proper Book, planned and written as a whole, but a miscellaneous collection rather misleadingly packaged.There are further major problems One is the sheer indiscriminateness of Clark's assault. Modernists, postmodernists, Marxists and ultra-relativists, Francis Fukuyama, Eric Hobsbawm and Linda Colley, social scientists who trespass on the historian's territory and essayists who mock the monarchy, people who think history has no meaning and those who endow it with (in Clark's eyes) the wrong meanings - all are lumped, and damned, together.

Richard Evans's In Defence of History, which assailed the postmodernists from a far more leftish and secular standpoint, does a more effective, because more scrupulous, demolition job.So much is missing from Clark's historical vision. Despite his transatlantic interests, the British Empire barely features on his map of the 18th-century world. Histories of gender are predictably absent, but so are those of ecology, of the body, of sexuality, the emotions, and the great explosion of new work on diasporas, migrations and prehistories of globalisation. Historians' new attention to "spatiality" is equally lost to his view. This has involved some of what Clark would call "postmodernist" excesses, and some silly grandstanding about how space is more important than time in studying societies, but it has also revitalised tired debates.So has new attention to the relationship - and conflicts - between history and popular memory. Clark gestures towards this, especially via friendly allusions to the late Raphael Samuel: but it is a mere gesture. He dismisses, too, the history of suppressed minorities as just "myopic narratives of grievance".

Some of feminist or black history, for instance, fits that bill. But much more has greater ambitions and promise than that, exploring the ways in which looking from the margins of society can offer a transformed vision of the whole.Clark, at least, has the merit of insisting that these seemingly arcane debates matter a great deal - not just for historians. In that moral urgency lies the greatest strength of his otherwise deeply disappointing book. Its detailed encounters with aspects of British and American history will engage - and infuriate - specialists.

The sweeping remarks about the state of the world may entertain (or again infuriate) a wider readership. But they would have been more suitably published as a think-piece. Anyone buying the book in the expectation that it's mainly about those broad themes, or has anything particularly novel to say on them, will be frustrated.Stephen Howe's latest book is 'Empire: a very short introduction' (Oxford). Louise Canova, heroine of Kathleen Tessaro's appealing first novel, has a life spiralling out of control. She cannot stop sleeping all the time, her eating patterns are masochistic, her tidiness-obsessed actor husband barely notices her, she has violent nightmares, and her one female friend is both envious and dismissive.