The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain
Kenneth O. Morgan, editor
646 pages, with index
Published in 1991

A general overview of the history of Britain, divided in 10 chapters:

Roman Britain (55 B.C. - AD 440)

Peter Salway

The Anglo Saxon Period (440-1066)

John Blair

The Early Middle Ages (1066-1290)

John Gillingham

The Later Middle Ages (1290-1485)

Ralph A. Griffiths

The Tudor Age (1485-1603)

John Guy

The Stuarts (1603-1688)

John Morrill

The Eighteenth Century (1688-1789)

Paul Langford

Revolution and the Rule of Law (1789-1851)

Christopher Harvie

The Liberal Age (1851-1914)

H. C. G. Matthew

The Twentieth Century (1914-1991)

Kenneth O. Morgan

Each chapter sketches the main lines of British history and also provides more background information about the character of the period in question.

Because each chapter is written by a different historian, whose area of expertise it is, it lacks a certain amount of cohesiveness, of focus. There's also the problem that not everybody is a good enough writer, as opposed to historian, to keep one's attention. Especially the earlier chapters, up until the Stuarts suffered from this.

On the whole however it's a reasonable one volume overview of the history of Britain, with this caveat that the twentieth century got some short shift.