After you get a new haircut, you quickly tire of people informing you that you have a new haircut; in that respect, having a conspicuous beard, as I do, can be like having a new haircut every day of the year. Some people like to assert that modern beards are novelty conversation pieces for men who have nothing more interesting to say for themselves. But I assure you I would rather take a lifelong vow of silence than make small talk about my beard one more time.

And I mean that in a cultural as well as in a social setting. Remarkably, Christopher Oldstone-Moore’s Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair isn’t even the first history of beards to come out this century. I haven’t read Allan Peterkin’s One Thousand Beards: A Cultural History of Facial Hair, from 2002, but it must at least get credit for prescience. Meanwhile, the review you’re now reading is by my count the 16th article about beards that the Guardian will have published this year (even though “peak beard” was reached either in 2013, according to the Guardian, or in 2014, also according to the Guardian). It would be hypocrisy for me to suggest that this newspaper is covering the beard phenomenon with greater diligence than is absolutely necessary. But when you carry your analysis of a subject so very far beyond what that subject can actually withstand, what you are verging on is a kind of hypergraphia.

For Oldstone-Moore, however, beards repay our fixation. “Considering facial hair,” he argues, is a way of “tracking and explaining” the “mutability and variety of ideas of manhood within a given period, and across time”. So presumably what we can expect paragraph by paragraph is fun trivia about beards, and what we can expect chapter by chapter is the sort of substantive insight into “ideas of manhood” that only beards can provide.

A book such as this needs to deliver on both levels. I’m not quite sure it delivers on either. We learn that in 1860 an 11-year-old girl called Grace Bedell wrote a letter to Abraham Lincoln encouraging him to grow a beard because “you would look a great deal better for your face is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands to vote for you and then you would be President.” Lincoln took her advice. The following year, on his inauguration tour, he met Grace in her hometown. “Look at my whiskers,” he told her. “I have been growing them for you.” Isn’t that a lovely story? Yes, it is. Are there enough stories of that quality to keep the average reader entertained for 300 pages? No, there are not.

But what about “ideas of manhood”? Much depends here on how persuasive you find the entailments that Oldstone-Moore draws between historical circumstances and barbal fashions. Some of these are a bit feeble. Here’s the Enlightenment: “Only a few years before Newton’s [Principia Mathematica] appeared, King Louis XIV of France and his court abandoned their pencil-thin mustaches, the last remnants of the Renaissance beard movement. The turn to reason and the razor were not directly linked, nor were they mere coincidences. As the mastery of nature now seemed more necessary and possible, it was fitting that authoritative masculinity was being redefined as a matter of refinement and education.” What causal structure is being proposed by a word like “fitting”? Or is it not so much a causal structure as just, you know, a vibe?

Other case studies, starting in Sumerian times, are more robust. The problem is they still mostly feel like rationalisations post hoc. In a mirror universe where, on the contrary, European men had grown bushy beards during the Enlightenment, Oldstone-Moore would no doubt highlight Locke over Newton: “As individual will and natural rights now seemed more necessary and possible,” he would say, “it was fitting that authoritative masculinity was being redefined as a matter of authenticity and self-realisation.”

In his introduction, he insists that “changes in facial hair are never simply a matter of fashion”. But this book can be reminiscent of the most irksome sort of fashion criticism, where if this season’s Chanel collection is rather austere, it’s because of the recession, but if this season’s Chanel collection is rather lavish, it’s because of the recession. To say that is not to dismiss the entire project of cultural history. History from strange angles can often be far more intimate and memorable than the conventional approach. It’s just that the link between beards and any real meaning, any consequential tendency, has almost always been so fickle and tenuous and arbitrary. If you need an explanation for shaving and not-shaving in a given period, an analogy with team colours will get you 90% of the way there. If one team wears blue, the other team will wear red. All the research in this very thorough book still cannot outbalance this common-sense rule.

In 1925, a Chicago Tribune reporter stood on a street corner asking about the decline of moustaches. “Right now everybody wants to look young and keep looking young,” one man told him, “and we all like to have everybody else looking young and feel young. And that’s a good sign.” Here, it does feel as if we may have found out something new about America in the jazz age, something that we could not have found out quite so lucidly unless Oldstone-Moore had gone to the trouble of combing through the beard archives.

And yet how can we know that the street-corner respondent was not himself contriving a glib theory to fit the facts already established? Because one thing this book shows us is that people have always made too much of beards. For a curmudgeon like me, it’s tempting to assume that no other age but our own could have expended so many column inches on a triviality of grooming. But Oldstone-Moore refutes that by cataloguing some of the piffle that accompanied the beard debates of the second half of the 19th century. “The natural and appropriate spheres of man and woman, respectively, are plainly indicated by the hirsute, bristling image of the one and the less-protected face of the other,” claimed the American magazine Every Saturday in 1871.

Oldstone-Moore attributes this sort of rhetoric to an uneasiness about masculinity as “men’s work moved from fields and workshops to offices and factories” and woman slowly gained in status and visibility. That I do buy. What I will take away from Oldstone-Moore’s book is an argument not stated outright in the text but nevertheless contained within it: that beards are something people like to chatter about and legislate over as a sort of displacement activity when they find it too awkward or confusing to address the issues that actually matter. When the historians of the future look back on the attention our culture lavished on a trend for facial hair, I hope they ask themselves: just what were we so desperate to distract ourselves from?