First Class: A History of Britain in 36 Postage Stamps by Chris West: review The 1881 Penny Lilac stamp was issued 33 billion times, enough so that if the little purple silhouettes of Queen Victoria were stretched out side by side, they would reach around the equator 16.5 times. "More sensibly," Chris West observes, "the Victorians put them on letters." This is just one of the many telling snippets to emerge in this jaunty account of Britain's recent history, as traced through the story of the postage stamp. Other irresistible pieces of trivia include the fact that the red post box, proud icon of British identity, used to be green - and French. When the first stamp, the Penny Black, was issued in 1840, many found it disgracefully disrespectful to lick the back of the monarch's head. More recently, we learn that the commemorative stamps of Diana, Princess of Wales made £6 million for charity and that today India has 150,000 post office branches, the most in the world. Appropriately enough for a patriotic British history, the stamp itself emerges as something of an underdog. When Rowland Hill, pioneer of the modern postal service, launched a competition inviting the public to design materials for a penny post, almost all the 2,600 entries were for envelopes and letters; only 50 for adhesive labels. It was only when the engraver William Wyon submitted a sketch of the queen that the stamp as we know it was born. All this is fascinating enough, but the book isn't really about stamps. Rather, these sticky bits of paper are used as windows onto the changing mores of recent history, from the grand ambitions of the Victorian age, through Edwardian music halls, two world wars, privation, post-colonialism, and the shift towards touchy-feely modernity reflected in the smiling engagement photo stamp of Prince William and Catherine Middleton. West is particularly enjoyable on the Victorians, capturing with glee the elevated, occasionally vituperative, tones of the era. Today's Prime Minister's Questions looks positively flaccid compared with the verbal sparring that is noted here. William Gladstone, we are reminded, once told his political enemy, Benjamin Disraeli, "I predict, sir, that you will die either by hanging or of some vile disease." Disraeli replied: "That all depends, sir, upon whether I embrace your principles or your mistress." The strongest image in this book is arguably at the start of a chapter considering what caused the Second World War. Dating from 1923, it is a German stamp costing 200 marks, overwritten with the figure two million. It shows the hyperinflation in Germany which followed the crushing Versailles Treaty and helped to usher Hitler into power. When West, asking rhetorically how Nazi atrocities could have taken place in a once civilised nation, writes, "Answer: take a good look at this stamp," it doesn't feel like too much of an overstatement. This kind of remark is typical of West's style, which happily demolishes in a few pages the kinds of questions - did Marx have a point? Did the empire do more harm or good? - that might otherwise consume whole volumes. In the best Victorian tradition, he is an amateur, a lover of stamps and of history, rather than a cautious academic. His book might be too light for real history buffs, but for the general reader it is rather like the stamps it describes: small, but perfectly formed. First Class: A History of Britain in 36 Postage Stamps by Chris West 272pp, square peg, t £14.99 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) Buy now from Telegraph Books