THE PLEASURES OF THE PAST: Reflections in Modern British History <i> by David Cannadine (W.W. Norton & Co.: $19.95; 338 pp.) </i>

It is quite astonishing to find coherence in a collection of miscellaneous book reviews and essays, “not a few of which were pondered and drafted in mid-air” as David Cannadine traversed the Atlantic in both directions. Cannadine’s pieces are eminently readable, well conceived and satisfyingly trenchant. Throughout, Cannadine, an Englishman and professor of history at Columbia University, follows his own admonition: “The fact that history is difficult, demanding and important is no reason for making it dull, or for taking it (or its practitioners) too seriously.”

A great joy in reading this book is Cannadine’s sense for the pithy phrase and the succinct characterization. In the section headed “Royalty,” readers get a “riveting peep” into the lives of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, another at George V, who for 17 years “did nothing at all but kill animals and stick in stamps.” Cannadine describes Lord Mountbatten, who presided over the dismantling of the British empire, as an unscrupulous and opportunistic man “whose own ideas were rarely good and whose good ideas were rarely his own”; he brilliantly finessed the politically touchy job of “closing things down,” thereby assuring himself a firm place in the larger picture of English history.

In an essay that points out the reactionary political overtones inherent in the current nostalgia for English country houses, Cannadine manages to work in the story about William Randolph Hearst, who told his wife that St. Donat’s castle, his recent Welsh purchase, was Norman. “Norman who?” she wondered. In the following chapter he takes up Sir Edwin Luytens, architect not only of New Delhi (an assignment that prompts Cannadine’s phrase “a bird of paradise in a chicken run”) but also of English country houses. Luyten’s houses “brilliantly caught (the) elegiac mood” of England early in the century, creating “a comforting picture of instant antiquity” not unlike those “beautiful, dreamy variations on traditional themes” we hear in the music of that late romantic composer, Elgar. In these essays--most of which are drawn from the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books--Cannadine may sometimes appear breezy or glib. But in each piece he seeks to elucidate historical or political problems, and he offers real insight into the current state of history and historiography. However clever the phrases, they yet invite serious reading. Beneath appearances, Cannadine is thoughtful, stimulating and one of those rare historians to give the complexities of history their due.