The head of history at a well-known English girls’ school was wont to say that she had learned nothing at Cambridge and all her history had been set in place at the age of ten by The Children’s Encyclopaedia.
Rebecca Fraser will know exactly what she meant. Massively informed, she is as unstuffy as the rest of the Fraser historians. On page one of her introduction she mentions ‘the immortal words of 1066 and All That’.
She has written this splendid history of Britain — 800-odd pages from the arrival of the Romans to Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee — because she could find nothing like it for her own children. She believes that while today’s children have the opportunity to handle esoteric historical documents they have no chronological sense; no idea, for example, how the Victorians link up with the Stuarts.
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