With Carlsberg closing down its British cask ale breweries and the sturdy, smelly black labrador yielding to the effete and fragrant cockapoo, there may be some truth in the recent inflammatory suggestion that a warm pint with a pet in a village pub is the deranged delusion of entitled Tory scum looking back yearningly to a Golden Age.

Just in time with a bracing corrective comes Simon Jenkins, our most trenchant spokesman for heritage. His latest subject is the village. But this is not a history of vernacular architecture in the manner of Ronald Brunskill, nor a learned study of building materials, because here Alec Clifton-Taylor cannot be surpassed. Instead, Jenkins gives us a macro-history of land use and communities, whose range is boggling or impressive depending on your appetite for the Big View. We travel at pace from Skara Brae, a neolithic settlement on Orkney, perhaps the oldest in Europe, to the King’s whimsical Poundbury, a favourite of Jenkins’s – despite what I would call hamfisted detailing, ignorant pastiche and a complete lack of soul. And we go from pescary rights in the Middle Ages to Clarkson’s Farm.

Healey’s Budget: ‘swirling uncertainties’ and 4p off gherkins

Kemi Badenoch had an annoyingly good PMQs

Sod the state: the middle-class race to go private

In between, there is a small diversion to Bicester Village, a hideous designer outlet mall in rural Oxfordshire, which is in truth........

© The Spectator