Here at last among the plethora of predictable books on the anniversary of the great war is an intelligent and critical assessment of what the war has come to mean for Britain over the century that separates us from its outbreak. David Reynolds invites us to consider how and why interpretations of the war have changed through time, and to take stock of the current version of the great war that will sweep across the country in the anniversary year.

The book has two main propositions. First, that the impact of the great war in the 20 years that separated it from what became the second world war was much less in Britain than in other parts of Europe; the shadow of the war was kept at bay by the many positive aspects of Britain's post-1918 history. Second, that the image of the great war was altered by what he calls the "refractions" created by the fact of a second global conflict, the cold war and the later post-communist Europe. During this second phase, he argues, the great war assumed its iconic status as a world of gloomy trenches, antiwar poets and wasted lives, and has, on the whole, stayed that way up to the present. He fears that the commemorations next year will be filled with more Sassoon and Owen, and melancholy evocations of life on the western front.

This is a challenging thesis, presented with a masterly array of sources across a busy century, at once thought-provoking and thoroughly informed; the prose is fluent and zestful, and the arguments are constructed with a fine level of critical observation. Reynolds's object is to highlight the British engagement with the war, while at the same time exploring what was different in the reception in Europe and the US. At times this approach makes the arguments less focused than they might be, and it forces him to put in a good deal of less relevant historical narrative simply to keep his readers abreast of what is happening in the wider world. The purpose is to highlight what he sees as unique or particular about the changing relationship with the great war in British public history.

Of the two propositions, the first is less convincing than the second. The idea that Britain had less historical anguish after the war than other combatants is at one level obvious – Britain was a victor power, experienced no shift to fascism or communism, ruled a global empire and suffered less than other economies from the prolonged crises of the early 1920s and the slump. Anyone living in Russia, Italy, Germany or the new states carved out of the Austro-Hungarian empire knew that the great war had destroyed the old political order, overturned the class balance of the pre-1914 age, and generated ideological hatreds and race prejudices that reverberated down to the end of 1945 and even beyond.

Britain was almost certainly less self-absorbed with the consequences of the war. Memory of the conflict was, Reynolds argues, kept alive but discreetly so, without great noise or time spent on morbid reflection (though this hardly explains why Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth became a runaway bestseller in the mid-1930s). But the sense of a "morbid" civilisation came not from a concern with the war itself, but with many other ambiguities and paradoxes provoked by fears for the economic future, the possibility of political radicalism, eugenic anxieties about the health of an "imperial people", and realisation that the empire's days were possibly numbered. When 1939 came, it was not a surprise. A morbid personality worries about ill health and mortality while in reality being in better shape. Otherwise it is difficult to reconcile the doubts and uncertainties about the future with the fact, as Reynolds shows, that there was nothing in Britain to resemble the punishing economic desperation or political terror that characterised so much of the rest of Europe.

On one issue there are certain to be objections. Reynolds argues that the nationalist crises that hit central and eastern Europe, and contributed to the collapse of the Austrian war effort, never occurred in Britain, where he suggests that Welsh and Scottish nationalism was set aside after the war in a renewed sense of solidarity from shared sacrifices. This argument fails to acknowledge how weak were political movements for challenging the English state before 1914, but, above all, consigns Ireland to a history cut off from the nationalist struggles elsewhere. The Irish revolution was indeed just that, one of a number of nationalist revolutionary struggles sharpened by the war, with all the violence (including civil war) that marked the transition to a new Poland, the failure of the Ukraine, or the muted struggle between Slovaks and Czechs over the kind of state they would create. Here, for once, British exceptionalism is hard to establish.

On the second proposition Reynolds is on firmer ground. The surveys of culture and experience in the post-1939 world present a complex web of influences and ideas that have shaped the way the great war became the first world war (itself a consequence of the insistence by many historians that this was a new thirty years' war) and then finally the "Tommies' war", soldier-poets in the trenches. The sense that the great war was a futile killing ground grew in proportion to the idea that the second world war was a "good war", fought to free the world from Hitlerism. Though poetry abounded in the second war, it is scarcely remembered now. There is no equivalent of the trench "Tommy" in the second war, but instead a return to old-fashioned notions of English heroism epitomised by the youthful pilots of the battle of Britain.

Reynolds understands that the idea of the great war as trenches and poems grew in significance from the 1960s, and was soon embedded in school curricula and media representations of the conflict (unlike in continental European countries, where the war receded in popular memory due to the horrors and conflicts provoked by world war two). He is surely right to argue that this has narrowed the popular perspective. Schoolchildren can visit the "trench experience" at the Imperial War Museum; in history lessons, "empathy" is taught by getting children to write imagined letters from a Tommy in a trench. What Reynolds hopes for from the commemorations is a more historically sophisticated understanding of the course and nature of the war in all its aspects. Let it be hoped that his book will contribute to that broader understanding. Let it be hoped, too, that those who objected to the war and campaigned to keep the peace are not forgotten either. The long shadow of war has all but erased these protests, but reflecting on peace might in 2014 be a sounder option than reflecting on war.

• Richard Overy's The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945 is published by Allen Lane.