The Motoring Age - The Automobile and Britain 1896-1939: Don't look to this book for loving descriptions of De Dion Boutons of 1927 flying down the Great West Road with Douglas Bader at the wheel. You will be disappointed if you are looking for technical specifications of Mulliners' bespoke bodywork for red-initialled Rollers.
You won't get endless reminiscences of the great days of double-declutching or paeans to the powerful exhaust note of blood-red Maseratis.
And the Model T is here, not for technical reasons, but because it is the physical manifestation of Henry Ford's real and lasting bequest to the modern world, mass production on an assembly line, putting a family car within reach of the average family budget, and much more.
My father learned to drive in a Model T. In the 1930s he owned two, one for driving, the other for spares. He learned to drive at the Strawberry Beds alongside the Liffey near Lucan.
"My mother and my sister sat in the back, saying the Rosary out loud," he told me years later. "They always said the sorrowful mysteries."
Henry changed the world. And Peter Thorold's book examines how the world changed in the first half of the 20th century. Henry and his imitators invented a new freedom to travel, a freedom that changed so much.
Some of the effects are superficial. Lifestyles changed, holiday resorts prospered, fashions changed as more and more Bright Young Things, pleasure-bent, flocked to resorts like louche Brighton.
The lives of women were changed in much more fundamental way. Olive Tierney, a young woman from Norfolk, drove a lorry carrying aircraft parts in the mornings and a taxi in the evenings during the first World War. "I wouldn't have believed it possible to have enjoyed a life so different (to my previous sheltered existence). It was great fun - the freedom and the unconventionality of it all, sitting in a taxi on a rank waiting for jobs and all day running about somewhere."
Olive, her sisters and her daughters would no longer be content to stay at home. And when a woman's life changes, so does that of her menfolk.
A Mr Craig of the Putney Motor Company provides a nice snapshot of part of the motoring public in a guide he wrote for those who sought jobs as drivers in the 1930s, though it's clear that he had men in mind.
There were opportunities in work for music hall artistes who use a motor to crowd more "turns" in a night's work than they can do with a horse cab. He warns about another category of potential employer, "the fiercely-goggled fiend, the racing man who may want to travel at 100 mph after a night on the champagne."
In general, Mr Craig says the aspiring chauffeur should state in his application for work that he is "a life abstainer" or, if that is not credible, "abstemious all my life". A chauffeur's clothing should be restrained and should not be influenced by the fact that some car owners dress "to look like something between an overgrown goat and a door mat". Nor should chauffeurs accept positions that involve gardening or valeting duties. "Such positions should be left for Chinese or other amiable aliens," he advises.
This book succeeds in depicting the excitement of it all as ordinary people's lives changed so quickly. At one level motoring was fun, challenging and exciting. At another, people could work farther from home, so the interfaces between town and country changed.
Businesses became viable in places where previously there had been no workforce. The railways had begun this process; the London Underground was built to get people to work in the city from far-flung suburbs, but lacked the pervasiveness of the car. The countryside came within reach of family outings in a way nobody had foreseen. Fresh foodstuffs were delivered to market more quickly and diet improved.
Even morals changed. Le Dirty Weekend predated the car, but achieved new popularity in the golden age of motoring. The car itself became a trysting place for couples, offering new opportunities for privacy and intimacy.
The author is right to confine this Golden Age to the period before the second World War. Afterwards motoring never quite regained the sense of pioneering excitement it had before. It was nice for a family to have a Morris Minor for outings, but the blood did not race at the sight of it.
For Britain the dreadful and unnecessary decline of its motor industry lay ahead. The author does well to remind us that, after the war ended, a British committee, headed by then motor industry luminary Sir William Rootes, considered acquiring the Volkswagen plant in Germany, but turned it down. The VW was "ugly, noisy and insufficiently robust for British roads" the Hillman Motors boss decided. Who remembers Hillman now?
Nonetheless the pace of change continued. History is bunk, Henry Ford said, but he was wrong - he "dissed" his own part in it.
This very readable book is not a history of Ford, but a well crafted and intelligent social history of how the car changed the way we live.
• The Motoring Age - The Automobile and Britain 1896-1939
by Peter Thorold - Profile Books £20