For Americans, the history of Britain is at once familiar and alien, like a story heard long ago and intermittently remembered. Even if our ancestors never came within 1,000 miles of London, even if we have never seen a hedgerow or heard a nightingale, the history of Britain still belongs to us, thanks to the two inheritances that continue to bind us to England – our political institutions and our language. Most American readers carry around some imaginative mosaic of England, pieced together from dozens of sources – Shakespeare’s plays and Austen’s novels, the story of the American Revolution, epic movies, memories of the world wars. Names and dates stand out in sudden flashes of recognition – George III, Winston Churchill – or recede into the shadows of vague familiarity – Hengist and Horsa, Judge Jeffreys, Thomas à Becket.

In other words, American readers need a general history of Britain, almost as much as the British themselves do. When it was published in the U.K. two years ago, Rebecca Fraser’s “The Story of Britain From the Romans to the Present: A Narrative History” (W.W. Norton, 829 pages, $35) was titled “A People’s History of Britain,” and while that title obviously would not have fit the American edition, it still helps to shed light on the kind of book Ms. Fraser has written. In a way, the original title is deliberately mischievous, since the phrase “people’s history” distinctly implies the history-from-below approach that has dominated historiography in recent decades. A “people’s history,” one might think, is a history of the people – of the masses, not the classes – like Howard Zinn’s leftist perennial, “A People’s History of the United States.”

Ms. Fraser’s book, however, is just the opposite: a traditional, not to say archaic, kind of narrative history focused almost exclusively on kings and battles. (Perhaps only a non-professional could have produced such a book today: Ms. Fraser is not a historian but a journalist, the daughter of the biographer Antonia Fraser.) “The Story of Britain” is even organized dynastically, with one chapter per monarch – not just in the days of the Plantagenets, when each new reign was a distinct political epoch, but right down to the present.

This top-down perspective carries through to the narrative, which is largely occupied with court intrigues, parliamentary politics, diplomacy, and war. In clear prose, Ms. Fraser guides the reader through some dense historical thickets – the genealogies of York and Lancaster during the Wars of the Roses, the legislative record of the Long Parliament, the electoral battles that destroyed the Liberal Party. These are not uniformly fascinating subjects, and probably few readers will ever need to be able to summon up the level of detail Ms. Fraser provides. But as an aerial map of British history, “The Story of Britain” is useful and comprehensive.

What Ms. Fraser leaves out, however, is precisely the ground-level view-the sense of what English history (and despite the title, her focus is overwhelmingly on England) was like for those who lived it. Ms. Fraser will sometimes interrupt her political narrative for a quick glance at the subjects that seem to interest her most – law, for instance, and architecture. She has less to say about literature and the arts, technology, economics, family life, or religious practice – not to mention lighter but revealing subjects such as clothing, cuisine, and popular culture. As a result, when she comes to major passages in British history that cannot be adequately explained in strictly political terms – like the Elizabethan Renaissance, the Puritan Civil War, or the Industrial Revolution – Ms. Fraser can offer only the most summary of explanations.

Ms. Fraser’s definition of people’s history, in other words, is not the history of the people, but the kind of history she believes the people should know: a didactic, generally uplifting account of elite politics, designed to emphasize Britain’s noblest traditions and values. “Ironic, kindly, democratic, humorous, energetic, tolerant and brave: surely these are the best qualities of the British people,” Ms. Fraser writes in her preface. Accordingly, she is drawn to events and characters that let these qualities shine, even if they are more legendary than historical: “the important thing” about national myths, she declares, “is that they have stood the test of time and continue to be related after hundreds of years.” So we find King Alfred allowing himself to be scolded by a peasant woman for letting the cakes burn and Henry V walking alone through his camp the night before Agincourt.

Such examples are wholesome enough, and they are certainly part of the traditional lore every reader wants to know. But when Englishmen insist on acting in ways that are not “kindly” and “humorous,” the problems with Ms. Fraser’s approach become clear. Thus she introduces us to Thomas More the principled martyr, a man of “natural authority,” faith and courage; but not to the More who, as Lord Chancellor, eagerly burned Protestants at the stake. She writes that Oliver Cromwell’s conduct in Ireland was “undoubtedly brutal, but not illegitimate by seventeenth-century rules”; yet she never makes quite clear that Cromwell’s conquest of the city of Drogheda involved the massacre of some 3,000 people.

These are just some of the more striking examples of Ms. Fraser’s general tendency to write from within “the story of Britain,” as its concerned sustainer, rather than its objective chronicler. The same attitude is evident in subtler ways throughout – as when Ms. Fraser writes that the British “balked at giving India self-rule,” because “a country with such widespread poverty and illiteracy was unready for democracy.” This may be an accurate account of what many 19th-century Britons said, and even believed, but it is deeply unrealistic about the economic and geopolitical realities of imperialism. For, as with every great nation, the story of Britain includes much that is not lovely or estimable. In many cases, it is only injustice that later allows justice to flourish. American readers are uniquely well equipped to appreciate such ironies, since our country represents the highest ideals of liberty but was founded on terrible acts of dispossession and slavery. Perhaps if Rebecca Fraser trusted her “people” with a more complex and tragic view of their history, she would have written a deeper and better book.