When I read that the think tank Civitas was re-issuing H E Marshall’s history book for children, Our Island Story, and sending it to every primary school in the country, I was gripped with nostalgia, pride and delight. Nostalgia because my parents used to read it to me when I was a child, as by far my most favourite bedtime storybook. Pride because I used to read it to my son Henry who now, aged eight, reads it himself for pleasure, and he gets precisely the same thrill from history as I did a third of a century ago. Delight because Civitas is giving thousands of British schoolchildren the chance to discover history as a story, a narrative adventure that inspires further interest in our shared national past.

Our Island Story, published in 1905, with its blue cover featuring the three lions of the arms of England, surrounded by gold laurel leaves and surmounted by a crown, has been virtually unobtainable for decades. It has been out of print for years, and even Amazon’s second-hand department and other online selling outlets such as www. abebooks don’t stock it for long, as there is always a rush to get copies by parents who want their children to read “real” history, the kind they themselves were taught.

You can buy a first edition from Australia for £1,850, but otherwise it’s been a question of downloading Our Island Story chapter by chapter from www.mainlesson.com. Even if Civitas only manages to reprint it in a virtual samizdat version, they will be doing this country’s young people a favour. The book’s underground popularity is such that the campaign to issue a centenary edition raised £13,345 from the readers of a national newspaper in one week.

In a sense samizdat is the right way for it to be republished anyhow. Chronological narrative history teaching has long been out of fashion among our post-modernist educational Establishment, let alone the retelling of the great stories of our national past without any sense of guilt or apology.

Written at the height of power of the British Empire in the first decade of the 20th century, Our Island Story and its sister book, Our Empire Story, radiate that sense of self-confidence in the global role of the English-speaking peoples that came naturally to people in those days. Yet H E Marshall was no solar-topeed, bewhiskered imperialist, but Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall, a New Zealander or Australian about whom very little is known. Nor was she a gung-ho militarist. Indeed, Lady Antonia Fraser, who first read Our Island Story in 1936 and who was inspired to become our most successful historian partly as a result, detects an element of pacifism in Marshall’s writing, and support for the American colonists during the American War of Independence.

For all that, the reason that parents will go to such lengths to try to track down copies of Our Island Story is because of the sheer quality of the writing. Telling a story from history might be old-fashioned, but it stimulates a child’s imagination like nothing else.

Here are chapter titles taken at random: how could one possibly not want to read to one’s children: How Caligula Conquered Britain, Hengist’s Treachery, Henry III — the Story of the Poisoned Dagger, Richard III — The Two Little Princes in the Tower, How England was Saved from the Spaniards, The Story of How the King Was Brought to His Death, and so on up to the Boer War.

The illustrations by A S Forrest are an integral part of the wonder of Our Island Story. I remember my feelings on seeing the richly coloured illustration of the long-haired, bearded warrior-statesman Alfred the Great — his battleaxe hung up on the wall next to his shield — perusing a huge scroll at a desk overflowing with them. “Alfred found much pleasure in reading,” was the caption. “Well if so,” I recall thinking to myself, “reading must be a good thing.” Let’s hope the schoolchildren in every primary school in the country come to the same conclusion after reading their free copy.