The Nineties: when surface was depth, by Michael Bracewell

It's usually hard to feel much respect or affection for a decade just past. The iconic status now given to the Sixties was not felt in the Seventies when, even before punk, there was a desire to reject hippy values and hide your Beatles LPs. The Nineties, when everything from comedy to cookery was deemed to be the new rock'n'roll (except for rock'n'roll itself), seems too close to assess. Can we really judge yet whether Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst will become part of art-history courses for their work, or for their ability to work the media? Will Britpop be as revered as punk, or as forgotten as glam rock? "Too early to say" would be the verdict of most historians. Cultural historians are a different breed, however. Instant judgements go with the territory.

Michael Bracewell is amply suited to grapple with the Nineties. His writing bristles with perception and irony – and the decade's one lasting legacy might be irony. Bracewell gives an acute and often very funny chronicle of how irony (with everything put in inverted commas, as he says) gave way to authenticity, and "the massed armies of Mockney, lads, ladettes and babes". He seizes, too, on what might be the decade's defining characteristic: the confessional, be it Princess Diana's Panorama interview, Emin's art or daytime television.

He is particularly penetrating when tracing the climate of executive fear that gave rise to the myriad of management manuals, and on the development of call-centre Britain. Its rhetoric of advertising and retail rested on the idea of personal contact with the customer but, in fact, expressed "a culture of endlessly deferred accountability".

Though thoroughly entertaining and informative, The Nineties does not always seem to be the book Bracewell wanted to write. While the decade had its fair share of retro, Michael Caine, Roxy Music and Duran Duran – all subjected to analysis – were hardly major players. Bracewell's argument seems to be that the movements and personalities of former decades were still exerting an influence. But I need a lot of convincing that Yoko Ono, the subject of one interview, was an artistic influence of any kind.

A bigger question is whether there is such a thing as "the" Nineties, rather than my or your Nineties. There is no denying that movements such as Britart and events such as the aftermath of Diana's death did help to define the British psyche. But cultural commentators can accept too readily the media's headlong embrace of popular culture and its cast list, as the decade's sole shaping force.

Bracewell conducts, for example, a solemn interview with Ulrika Jonsson, who can at a pinch claim the slightest footnote as a template for the ubiquitous blonde TV presenter. Yet a host of other names who could also stake claims – such as JK Rowling, Simon Russell Beale, Darcey Bussell, Mike Leigh – do not figure. That is the tyranny of popular culture and its commentators. It is also, admittedly, the tyranny of newspapers and mass media. Decades are defined by the headlines. But not everyone recognises their own lives in those headlines.