Britannia, 100 Great Stories from British History

Here McCaughrean applies an array of her considerable skills: as adapter and reteller, as short story writer, and as historian. She gives 8-12 year olds a brilliant helter-skelter ride through the most dramatic incidents in British history. Some of the hundred tales are purely legendary, like the foundation of Albion by Brutus the Trojan; others possess some truth, like Dick Whittington; and still others are more remarkable than fiction, like the Christmas football match in no man's land in the First World War, or Scott's last expedition. Drawing on a range of sources, including folk tale and Shakespeare, McCaughrean's subjects, each taking no more than two or three pages, offer a larger than life version of our past, which includes, among others, highway-men and kings, grave robbers and Jarrow marchers, Crippen and Grace Darling. This is a tour de force. Characters and incidents are deftly introduced and described with passion and flair. Brassey's illustrations are a joy. Never without humour, in a style that has echoes of Foreman and Chichester Clark, he moves easily, with colour and panache, from the intimate to the epic. This is an expensive book but worth every penny: even the further reading list has been carefully selected to offer an introduction to the best of children's historical fiction of the last forty years.