This is clear in the book's final section which fails to grapple with the mixed legacy of the Sixties or notice the emergence of a pervasive but barely visible liberal ideology that reflects the interests and lives of a mobile, graduate, upper professional elite (to which I will return). That Fawcett is part of that club is evident from his belief that the EU should become a more powerful organisation for a post-national world.

Nevertheless, the book's impressive historical sweep introduced me to several key figures in the history of liberal thought I had been barely aware of, especially in the French tradition. (I also understand better why liberals and socialists are more hostile to each other in France than in Britain, thanks to the "reactionary liberalism" of Guizot, Thiers and others.)

Fawcett shows how long-running many liberal disputes are, between, for example, Humboldt's desire to mould better citizens and Constant's desire to let people alone, between positive and negative liberty, between the national and the universal. And he is also good at pointing up how many of the great left v. right conflicts of the modern world — Keynes v. Hayek, Hoover v. Roosevelt — are actually arguments within liberalism.

His bird's-eye view illuminates many unexpected things too:  the extent, for example, to which the 1914-1945 crisis was a liberal one — the First World War was in part the outcome of decisions by Liberal governments (including in Britain and France) and the economic crisis was a crisis of liberal economics.

And there is early-20th-century liberalism's continuing reservations about democracy and enthusiasm for colonialism. As Fawcett points out, they have the same root: "The liberal-imperial attitude to ‘backward' peoples was little different from their attitude to unlettered, propertyless voters in their own countries . . . The ‘capacity' of both needed bettering and it fell to liberals to conduct the reform."

The book is scattered with useful pen portraits of Samuel Smiles (who turns out to have been a Chartist supporter), Abraham Lincoln, David Lloyd George (he could not see a belt without wanting to hit below it, according to Margot Asquith), Leonard Hobhouse, Gustav Stresemann, Michael Oakeshott and Lyndon Johnson ("probably smarter than John Kennedy") to name just a random few.

And I lost count of the striking observations: high wages are the Keynesian equivalent of universal suffrage; Europe is Roman law, Christian inwardness and German equality; in between pre-modern unity and modern diversity came a bridge of toleration; with modernity "suffocating coherence" vanished.

There were two surprising absences. First, there was hardly any mention of Rousseau's "general will" which fed into Jacobin and later Soviet notions of popular democracy, and against which liberal democracy has in part defined itself. Second, there was no mention of Europe's luck in developing a state, initially above all in England, that was neither too strong nor too weak. Another definition of liberalism might be the politics found in such fortunate places; places that have allowed the evolution from "sociocentric" societies, which subordinate the individual to group and tradition, to more individualistic ones.