A recent car journey, during which I was regaled from the back seat with a semi-dramatised version of Bonnie Prince Charlie's spirited but doomed attempt to squash the English, was testament to the skills of a good teacher but also to the power of stories. Apart from the tremendous thrill of legitimately, and repeatedly, using the word "bloody", it was the story which caught that child's imagination.
Philip Ardagh's Get A Life! series (Macmillan, £2.99) adopts a conversational tone but diligently packs in the facts. In his Queen Elizabeth I, the complicated circumstances surrounding the monarch's accession to the throne and her feisty manoeuvring to maintain control are told in a series of headlined paragraphs, the facts dotted with a series of cartoons and dry one-liners which 8-11s will love.
Ardagh is an enthusiastic explainer, and he revels in the complexity of British history. He avoids the temptation to embellish unnecessarily - the extraordinary stories are left to speak for themselves.
Every school child seems to "do" the second world war at least once. Bob Fowke's What They Don't Tell You About... World War II (Hodder, £3.99) gives a guided tour through the eyes of Linda Hand, a Land Army girl. Despite the jokey cover, the contents are weighty but highly accessible, and may well inspire conversations with relatives who remember that time. This is a detailed resource for 9- to 12-year-olds giving the wider context of the war in Europe and conveying the unsettling fact that, although the dates of the war are now second nature, the 1945 ending was not pre-programmed.
Paris 1789 (Sightseers, Kingfisher, £5.99) offers a historical picture of the city in the form of a travel guide. There is illustrated advice on clothing, health, art and accessing French society, set against the growing division between King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette and their subjects. Children from 8-12 will need supplementary information if they are to grasp the facts of the French Revolution, but this tangential approach is useful in putting the conflict into a social context.
More than 30 years ago, man landed on the moon. The event is now history, and all the more distant because it hasn't been repeated in the lifetime of schoolchildren. What Would You Ask Neil Armstrong? (Belitha, £8.99) tells the story of the first astronaut to walk on the moon, a man who fulfilled an extraordinary ambition and then, literally and metaphorically, came back down to earth. The book provides lots of technical and personal details which put the programme into context for 7-11s.
