THE SPIRIT OF BRITAIN: A Narrative History of the Arts.

By Roy Strong. Fromm International. 708 pp. $55

When the BBC first approached Kenneth Clark with the idea of a television series about the history of art, it was the word civilization that aroused his enthusiasm. "I had no clear idea what it meant," he wrote later, "but I thought it was preferable to barbarism, and fancied that this was the moment to say so." That casual impulse gave birth to a cultural landmark.

Strong’s survey is infused with a similar spirit of idiosyncrasy and personal discovery. He is even more out of step with the times than Clark was in the late 1960s. A monarchist, elitist, and practicing Christian, Strong cut a dandyish figure as director of the Victoria & Albert Museum and the National Portrait Gallery. After retirement, he accumulated gossip column inches by publishing his diaries, in which the scholarship boy from the lower-middle classes parades his fascination with high society in general and the Queen Mother in particular.

The Spirit of Britain arrives as the sister volume to Strong’s Story of Britain (1996). The reference to Britain is more or less cosmetic, since he makes no secret of the fact that England is the real subject of his story. As might be expected, he places conservatism and a love of tradition among the chief ingredients of the English character. On the other hand, he is realistic enough to acknowledge that this yearning for the past remains intense "even if that past is an imagined one."

His enthusiasm flags the nearer he comes to his own era. He makes only a glancing reference to the Beatles, and none at all to those homegrown phenomena, Ealing film comedies such as The Lavender Hill Mob (1950). By the time he arrives at the publicity-driven consumer culture of the 1980s, Strong’s disillusionment is palpable. He wonders what resonance Milton will have in a country that can already be defined as post-Christian. For all his innate conservatism, though, Strong does not idealize every aspect of yesteryear. National greatness and artistic creativity do not always coincide, as he notes in his overview of the closing years of the 19th century.

Strong’s prose sometimes falls short of its usual elegance, and he can falter when he ventures beyond the visual and decorative arts. He wrongly asserts that W. H. Auden emigrated to the United States in 1934. Not many admirers of that quintessentially English novelist, Anthony Trollope, would agree that The Warden (1855) is his masterpiece; Barchester Towers (1857) and half a dozen other titles seem much more likely candidates.

But Strong makes an opinionated tour guide—a rarity in these days of committeespeak. Individual chapters allotted to representative figures such as William of Wykeham, Horace Walpole, and Kenneth Clark himself illustrate the ebb and flow of values over the centuries. The lavish use of illustrations and the easy, conversational tone are in some ways reminiscent of Sir Ernst Gombrich’s magisterial narrative The Story of Art (1950). Just as Gombrich’s work was originally conceived as an introduction for younger readers, so Strong provides a robust overview in which text and image proceed hand in hand.

—Clive Davis