AS a child, I once caused panic in my grandmother's house by disappearing for hours. I was found in her attic, lying on a rolled-up carpet and reading a vast, Victorian tome on the kings and queens of England. I was lost to the world in its pages. I have been a sucker for a good history book ever since; and, my goodness, is Kathleen Burk's Old World, New World good. I read an advance copy on holiday this summer. A steaming mug of coffee, the sun rising over the Alps, the larks wheeling in the sky, and a rattling good tale of Britain and America since the late 15th century — life doesn't get much better!

In an age that has crassly relegated history to the lower divisions of public education, there is a crying need for books that are both accessible to the general reader and rest on serious scholarship. It helps too if they are well written, as is this book, subtitled The Story of Britain and America. Kathleen Burk passes all the tests. As a stylist she will never be up there with Gibbon. But her prose is direct and clear. She has pace — Burk is good on wars — and is adept at weaving into the narrative what she has harvested from her enormous bibliography of primary and secondary sources.

Old World, New World is inhabited by a massive throng of monarchs, politicians, soldiers, sailors, intellectuals and diplomats. Anecdotal gems are scattered throughout the text. Queen Victoria's first public appearance after the death of Prince Albert 25 years earlier was at Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Lower down the social scale you learn a lot of fascinating stuff about everyday life on both sides of the Atlantic. It is almost beyond the modern imagination to grasp the fortitude and sheer physical toughness of those 17th-century settlers, who managed to survive disease, starvation, hostile Native Americans and a ghastly two-month Atlantic crossing in tiny, cramped sailing ships. Thousands, of course, perished.

Burk is particularly good on what Britons and Americans thought of each other in the Victorian age. The century had begun with the two countries still heavily bruised by the War of Independence, to be further aggravated a few years later by the War of 1812. Even today Americans will remind you, with a kind of uneasy jocularity, that British troops burnt down Washington in 1814. They forget that this was a reprisal for their incinerating Toronto, then the capital of Canada.

As the century progressed, travel in each direction picked up pace. Many Americans and British wrote about their experiences. Their accounts tend to be an uneasy mix of admiration and disdain. The British were pretty rude in the early years. By the end of the century they found more to admire and respect about America, including very rich heiresses in search of English husbands.

Along the way they made some sharp observations, which resonate today: the power of evangelical religion; the all-pervasive self-righteousness; the deference to institutions; the paradox of conformist thinking in the Land of the Free. Burk judiciously quotes the more famous travellers such as Charles Dickens, Mrs Trollope, mother of the novelist, and James Bryce, Britain's de Tocqueville.

But it is the obscure Alex Mackay who, in 1849, makes the fundamental point: “English names are plentiful around you, and many objects within view have an English look about them. Yet, when the Englishman steps ashore, it is on a foreign, though a friendly land.”

This is one complicated relationship, where intimacy and hostility have mingled inextricably. Burk captures its essence brilliantly, in the process blowing away some of the glib platitudes of the so-called special relationship.

In the 1960s Dean Acheson made the judgment that “a unique relation existed between Britain and America... but unique did not mean affectionate. We had fought England as our enemy as often as we had fought by her side as an ally”.

Unduly harsh? Probably. But the two countries had come near to war on three or four more occasions in the 19th century. The 20th century saw furious rows about the debt we owed the US after each of the world wars. Even when the two were close allies against Fascism, America's strat-egic objective remained the break-up of the British Empire.

In the postwar period, the special relationship has been as much marked by its oscillations as by its constancy. If Blair/Clinton, Blair/Bush and Thatcher/Reagan were the high points, Eden/Eisenhower, Heath/Nixon and Wilson/Johnson were the low.

This fine book is a tale of two superpowers: how one reluctantly passed the baton to the other. For Britain, 200 years ago, America was a sideshow to the main Napoleonic event in Europe. But already in 1866, at the apogee of British influence, The Spectator could write: “The United States is a power of the first class, a nation which it is very dangerous to offend and almost impossible to attack.”

Today, as for the past century, America is the main event. Like it or not, there is nothing that she decides to do that does not affect our security and prosperity one way or another. Handling this indispensable ally, partner and friend, whose interests will often diverge from ours, is the supreme challenge for British diplomacy. Old World, New World should be compulsory reading in No 10 and the Foreign Office.

Old World New World: The Story of Britain and America by Kathleen Burk

Little, Brown, £25; 464pp

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