When I was studying in England, I would regularly take the red-eye flight back to London after visits home to Canada. To fight jet lag, I would spend my arrival day in the center of London, first popping into the Canadian High Commission to use the free e-mail (for Canadians or Canada-related inquiries; once upon a time a great traveler hack, utterly useless now) and then losing myself in the National Portrait Gallery across the road. I was a graduate student; the museum, like the e-mail, was free. And over the course of the year, those portraits became good friends, welcoming me back to my temporary home.

For Simon Schama, those portraits are more than friends: they are lovers, confidants, clients, celebrities, centers of power, representations of power. They are stories. They are history. Moreover—in marked contrast to their subjects, who are no longer—they remain alive. Portraits, Schama tells us early in The Face of Britain: A History of the Nation through Its Portraits and emphasizes often (in the closest refrain this enchanting book has to an argument), are a struggle against mortality. And he is right: the stories behind these pictures are still alive—but only because we have the storyteller to make them so. On my own, I could see the portraits and even love them, but I could not know them the way Schama does. Through his eyes, the picture changes. Dame Laura Knight's defiant 1913 self-portrait (with Ella Louise Naper) becomes both a technical triumph and a dramatic reclaiming of the bodies of women. Set in the context of contemporary painters like Henri Matisse and Roger Fry, Schama shows how Knight's portrait tells the story of the challenges of female artists and their resistance (413–17).

So this is a book about knowledge, but not in the way that we are used to from academic tomes. Beware, academic readers: this is something a bit different. Conceived of as a collaboration between Schama, the National Portrait Gallery, and the BBC, the book was first a five-part series of television programs. Each week, Schama acted as gallery guide, wandering through the halls to tell a story of Britain's history through its paintings, photographs, and sketches—specifically, through its faces. And of course, given Schama's legendary wit and storytelling prowess, he was the greatest, gossipiest tour guide possible. As audiences walked along with him, saw the pictures with and mediated by him, the format worked beautifully.

It is a harder brief, in a way, for a book. Many of the pictures cannot (due to cost) be included, though the ones we get are beautifully reproduced on the kind of thick, shiny paper that begs to be touched. Here Schama's eye for detail and love of language serve him well; he describes his often unexpected choices (there are some famous portraits here, but also more obscure ones), and we can, just about, see them in our mind's eye. And then he embroiders, gives us the context and the relationship of the sitter to the artist and the sitter to the commissioner and the sitter to the world she inhabits, and we see so much more. We see the history of Britain through the painter's style, and his reason for making the picture, and the sitter's reason for sitting, and the commissioner's status and needs and hopes for the portrait. And we see the game that Schama is playing, teaching us about style not just in portraiture, but in the pursuit of history itself. Style matters here, and Schama, like his painters, is a master of style.

Is it learned? Oh, yes, astonishingly so, but not in the usual way. No footnotes. No references. But is it right? We cannot know, not in the usual way. We must just trust Schama, while, if we choose, playing a delicious game of “spot the unacknowledged scholarly source” (Was that my own book he read when he referenced physiognomy? Probably not, but a girl can dream.). He earns our trust through cozy personal anecdotes and his well-known academic record, so we are willing to follow him on this rather meandering tour through faces and history. Nonchronologically. Do not expect a straightforward march from leader to power-hungry leader, lover to jilted lover, living celebrity to dead celebrity. The organization itself is meant to evoke a gossipy chat with the all-knowing curator who has his own system. But the table of contents and the structure mean that the reader can reorganize, dipping in to the stories that matter most to her, reading in her own way. We do not have to start at the beginning and end at the end: this kind of storytelling history allows for reshuffling.

There is too much here to summarize—and, at the same time, too little argument to sketch. Argument is not the point, except to say that portraits are not just about faces, but relationships, and that history is about relationships, and stories, and—importantly—how those stories are told. One strategy would be to pick one specific portrait or vignette to illustrate the style and the method; these range from the deep history of Churchill and how his attitude to his portrait reveals his own insecurities and awareness of the symbolic and political power of images for the politically inclined (247) to the nonchronological insertion of the iconic pre-assassination photo of Yoko Ono and John Lennon to illustrate Schama's repeated theme of the killing power of fame (“Moral: Don't go to bed with Fame. Because when you wake up you might be dead” [307]); to the discussion of cigarette portrait cards as a touching personal story about the origin of “the people's portrait gallery” (333). What unifies the selection of these vignettes seems to be the interests of the reviewer in question.

Good. It means you can dip in, and pick what you like to learn something about a particular portrait and a particular moment. Or you can read cover to cover and learn something about lots of portraits, and lots of moments. It might not add up to a comprehensive history of Britain, but it is a delightful peek into the private lives of public faces with the one person who may, the book aims to persuade us, know it all.

So make yourself a nice cuppa, curl up in a comfy chair, and get ready for a good long gossip with this compulsively readable, gorgeously illustrated, and highly personal (and personable) guide. You will have a lot of fun, and you will remember why you love history.