Just over a century ago, Our Island Story entranced a nation's children by telling their history in stories. Short, simply written chapters, packed with living characters and thrilling action - and illustrated with vivid colour pictures - illuminate all the main events from Britain's earliest days to the end of Victoria's reign. And its glorious fusion of myth and legend with sober fact - Canute and King Arthur with Cromwell and the Indian Mutiny - is as seductive now as it ever was.

'I was given H.E. Marshall's Our Island Story at Christmas 1936 and I've still got that copy. It was a direct inspiration for me in my career as a historian' Antonia Fraser, Daily Telegraph