Britons who have planned holidays in Egypt are being encouraged to go ahead despite the risk from terrorism. Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, went out of his way yesterday to praise Egypt as a stable country with effective law enforcement. His message to holidaymakers is: “Be aware of the risk, then make up your own minds.”

The Foreign Office and the US State Department issued new warnings yesterday to tourists visiting Egypt to take care. These latter have sometimes been severe and are never far from the public mind; but as Miles shows, in a hopeful and tolerant conclusion, Britain continues to need immigrants (we are short of about 166,000 babies each year to maintain the population, apart from the losses incurred by emigration), and their arrival is a continuation of the long saga of comings and joinings that constitute British history.Plenty of those comings were attended by problems; today’s second- and third-generation Muslim youth do not pose unprecedented questions. In the chapter entitled “New Britons”, Miles chronicles the immigration of the 20th century, and the ensuing opportunities and difficulties.

This happened most especially in the days of empire, but it happened earlier too. Seventeenth-century Poland had as many as 40,000 Scots living in it (Szkot there meant peddler or commercial traveller); the name Gordon became Gordonowski, Ramsay became Ramze, the city of Gdansk has a quarter called Stary Szkoty (Old Scotland), and the Poles still have the expression skapy jak Szkot denoting “mean as a Scot”.In the 17th century, over 300,000 English, Welsh and Scots migrated to Ireland in the wake of the accession of King James I and IV. Ireland was then severely depopulated, and most of the new immigrants settled in Ulster. Later Ireland was to become a great exporter of people in its turn, in the 19th century particularly, during the first quarter of which no fewer than 1.5m Irish men and women emigrated to America.It is always interesting to note how the history of Britain in the 19th century is in effect the history of the world, and Miles’s account recognises that fact; but true to his aim he keeps his eye on those whom the country’s wealth and industry drew inwards, adding to the tribes already here: Jews, Chinese, people from all over Europe, and increasingly from all over the Empire. They were the last military invaders, though far from the last immigrants to add their mixture to the British stock.Miles proceeds to point out that our islands not only accepted many successive waves of incomers, invaders, occupiers and immigrants, but was a massive exporter of peoples also. Their coastal raids, beginning in the eighth century, were so ferocious that contemporary records said they were prefigured by whirlwinds, flashes of lightning and “fiery dragons flying in the air”.

Though the culture of south-east England became Saxon, says Miles, “genetically perhaps two-thirds of the population were of British descent”.The next chapter of the story is a bloody one, for it tells of the Vikings or Norsemen, who definitely came in unpeaceable guise. But Miles argues that this did not happen quite as once believed. Saxon fighters came, yes; but their “invasion” was more an immigration than a conquest, assimilating to the local native population over time. That is what the archaeology of Berinsfield in Oxfordshire suggests, as does the linguistic evidence of place names. Miles is a gradualist, and this theme dominates his book.Archaeological and historical methods are what Miles most focuses upon in taking readers from the remote past to pre-Roman times, then to the Roman period, then to the tumultuous epoch following the Romans’ departure, when (as the monk Gildas put it) “foul hordes of Picts and Scots, like dark throngs of worms who wriggle out of narrow fissures in the rock” began to prey on the weakened land, obliging Rome’s native successors to ask the warlike Saxons for help, thus inadvertently succumbing to a more successful invader.

Alongside this he conjures Hans Christian Andersen so beautifully that it’s hard not to live through Andersen’s journey as intimately as Booth’s, and it may send you back to the fairy tales to read them anew. In this bicentenary year, there will be plenty of biographies of Andersen, but none as funny, or occasionally as touching, as this.. Patrick O’Keeffe’s debut has managed to take conservative literary subjects like rural Ireland and nostalgia for the past and make them stylistically challenging – no mean feat for any writer, never mind one just into print. Each of the four novellas in this volume deals with death or abandonment deep in the Irish countryside.

O’Keeffe strides with confidence through the Limerick he himself grew up in. Only the second tale, “Her Black Mantilla”, threatens to overdose on sentimentality and abuse our suspension of disbelief. When Alice comes to clean and care for the aged Lena Tarpey and her housebound brother, she is met on the road by Davie Condon. He just happens to be the man, we discover, who got her older sister Margaret pregnant and abandoned her the night they were due to run away together. Margaret later died in childbirth, leaving Alice alone, to be brought up by nuns. The coincidences of his meeting with Alice and its outcome are just a little too neat.
No such worries mar the three remaining stories, however.