It's just that the book isn't really about home. Instead, we learn, among much else, that lobsters were once so abundant in Britain that servants sought agreements from their employers that they would not be served them more than twice a week. We never do find out what Einstein thought about his holidays or about the ankles of the young lady. This is a charming notion, but it remains just that. Even Einstein will have spent large parts of his life thinking about his holidays or new hammock or how dainty was the ankle on the young lady alighting from the tram across the street'. In the opening chapter, Bryson tells us that what he suddenly realises is that history is 'masses of people doing ordinary things. The bedroom is where he brings up an 1878 debate from the British Medical Journal on whether the touch of a menstruating woman could spoil a ham. Thus, the chapter on the kitchen is where he discourses on the Duke of Marlborough, who was 'said to be so cheap, he refused to dot his 'I's when he wrote, to save on ink'. And his method is to lead us on a history of Britain and North America via the rooms in his house. Home, he claims, is where history ends up. While Bryson's book purports to be about private life, it's really about whatever takes his fancy. At Home has all the hallmarks of being written by someone with a certain sort of intellectual thirst, a lavish income and too much time on his hands, qualities that in our own age are more likely to be found not in clergymen, but bestselling authors. They've disappeared now and country vicars are neither rich nor leisured, but Bryson is about as close to a modern equivalent as you can find.

He cites the examples of George Bayldon, whose services were so poorly attended he converted half his church into a hen-house, and Reverend George Garrett, who pioneered submarine design. In consequence, many of them began, quite spontaneously, to do remarkable things'. He was, Bryson writes, one of 'a class of well-educated, wealthy people who had immense amounts of time on their hands.

Thomas JG Marsham would have enjoyed an income of around £500 – £400,000 today. In the first chapter of At Home, Bill Bryson surveys his own home, an old Norfolk rectory, and considers the career of the young rector for whom it was built in 1851.

At home a short history of private life