ELVYN Bragg has such a high profile as a broadcaster, film maker and novelist, it is easy to forget that one reason for his success is that he is also an excellent journalist, an enthusiastic populariser of both the arts and sciences.

His latest venture, a description of 12 books that changed the world, is compellingly readable and packed with fascinating facts and well-chosen anecdotes.

It has, inevitably, a television tiein, and the contributions of the team at ITV are generously acknowledged. But it is very much more than ?the book of the TV series", being, apparently, a genuine product of its author's personal enthusiasms.

The result is generous, witty, entertaining and highly informative, and will no doubt fly to the top of the bestseller lists.

It is bookended by two indisputable greats, Isaac Newton and William Shakespeare. Bragg explains that his criteria for selection were practical: he wanted to feature books that have changed the way we live our everyday lives.

This is not a reading list; some of them are not even books (The Magna Carta, The Patent Specification for Arkwright's Spinning Machine; William Wilberforce's speech On the Abolition of the Slave Trade); they are pieces of writing that have had a resounding impact on the way we live our lives today.

Each chapter has a user-friendly bibliography listing key texts for further reading, and a chronological timeline tracing the book's impact from its publication to the present day.

The idea grew from a fascination with Isaac Newton, a lonely figure working in an isolated Lincolnshire farmhouse, forcing his mind to construct theories which changed the world, his Principia Mathematica.

Newton had fled Cambridge to avoid the plague, and was working 20 hours a day when he discovered the three laws of motion and formulated his theory of gravity. These ideas still inform contemporary activity, underlying, for example, the satellite industry, supersonic aircraft, ultrasonic scanning and the laser industry.

Bragg's refusal to mystify or glorify creative enterprise or loosely to use the term 'genius', and his accompanying admiration for hard work, crops up with Newton, and recurs with other prodigious workers such as Mary Wollstonecraft (who wrote the 452 pages of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in six weeks), Charles Darwin, Adam Smith and Michael Faraday.

?Imagination flows to wherever the intensity of a profoundly wellprepared mind beckons it, " is how Bragg describes the process.

This is not intended as a book of the 12 most influential books in the world. Bragg explains that at one stage he had such a list, dominated by the ancient Greeks, God books, Marx and Mao. By limiting his choice to 12 books written inBritain, he has produced a more culturally coherent list, which relates more readily to people's everyday lives.

Bragg wanted to cover a range that would include leisure alongside science and the constitution, changes in technology and changes in society. For this reason he has taken the widest possible definition of 'book'.

So there is no Dr Johnson, no Tom Paine, but we do have William Wilberforce's fourhour parliamentary speech On the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and Marie Stopes, the author of Married Love (1918), pioneering sexologist and founder of England's first birth control clinics. Her foundation is now providing sexual health information to 4.3 million people in 39 countries.

Nevertheless, there is a whiff of the 'little Englander' about this, and also the inclusion of the Patent Specification for Arkwright's Spinning Machine, which attempts to credit England with the founding of the global cotton industry as well the ending of the slave trade and the invention of contraception.

England did, apparently, invent soccer. The Rule Book of Association Football, which I assumed would be one of the dullest chapters, is one of the liveliest. The rule book was drawn up by a group of former public schoolboys in 1863 in London, all of whom had learnt a different variant of the game at school.

The game itself goes back far older than 1863; anthropologists reckon the idea of blowing up the bladder of a newly-slaughtered animal and kicking it around is spontaneous and traditional in several societies.

Bragg cannot resist including the story that the game originated in Chester, and was played by AngloSaxons with the heads of the conquered Danes.

The Rules led to the differentiation of football from rugby. The name soccer was derived from ?association". The British working classes were encouraged to take up the game, playing it on their free Saturday afternoons, to improve their physique. The game was spread by visitors to Britain who took it home with them, and by British workers, sailors and soldiers who took it abroad with them.

This year's World Cup will be watched by eight out of every 10 people on this planet. The Federation Internationale de Football Association (Fifa), founded in Paris in 1904, currently has more member countries than the United Nations . . . 204 to 191.

Melvyn Bragg is also a novelist, with a literary background, and his close textual analyses of the works in question are often inspired. He is especially strong on the King James Bible (1611), and the debt it owes to William Tynedale.

Bragg reports that his novelist friend Howard Jacobson was appalled to find no fiction in here.

But Bragg argues that his book is about books that have changed the way we live, whereas ?fiction changes the lives of individuals in unquantifiable ways".

He does, though, include William Shakespeare's First Folio (1623), and who can quibble with that?

The 12 books

Principia Mathematica by Isaac Newton (1687)
Married Love by Marie Stopes (1918)
Magna Carta by members of the English ruling classes (1215)
The Rule Book of Association Football by a group of former English public schoolboys (1863)
On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (1859)
On the Abolition of the Slave Trade by William Wilberforce (1789)
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft (1792)
Experimental Researches in Electricity by Michael Faraday (three volumes, 1839, 1844, 1855)
Patent Specification for Arkwright's Spinning Machine by Richard Arkwright (1769)
The King James Bible by William Tyndale and 54 scholars appointed by the king (1611)