Simon Schama

'Great art has dreadful manners...' Simon Schama observes at the start of his epic exploration of the power, and whole point, of art. 'The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are polite things, visions that soothe, charm and beguile, but actually they are thugs. ...

'Wednesday brought a pungent sheepy smell emanating from the greyish lamb and barley soup my mother optimistically called 'Taste of the Garden of Eden'. Expel me, please. Haddock in the air? That would be Thursday. The faintest whiff of roasting garlic? That would be what my sister and I uncharitabl...

'While Britain was losing an empire, it was finding itself...' The compelling opening words to "The Fate of the Empire", set the tone and agenda for the final stage of Simon Schama's epic voyage around Britain, her people and her past. Spanning two centuries, crossing the breadth of the em...

'Great Britain? What was that?' asks Simon Schama at the start of this, the second book of his epic three-volume journey into Britain's past. This volume, "The British Wars", is a compelling chronicle of the changes that transformed every strand and stratum of British life, faith and thoug...

'History clings tight but it also kicks loose,' writes Simon Schama at the outset of this, the first book in his three-volume journey into Britain's past. 'Disruption as much as persistence is its proper subject. So although the great theme of British history seen from the twentieth century is endur...

In November 2008, the United States elected a new President. But the collapse of twenty years of Republican conservativism means the country is already conducting an intense self-examination about the trajectory of its history; how it came to find itself in multiple crises and how an America that be...

"Rough Crossings" is the astonishing story of the struggle to freedom by thousands of African-American slaves who fled the plantations to fight behind British lines in the American War of Independence. With gripping, powerfully vivid story-telling, Simon Schama follows the escaped blacks into the fi...

The most authoritative social, cultural and narrative history of the French Revolution, and one of the great landmarks of modern history publishing. 'Monumental...provocative and stylish, Simon Schama's account of the first few years of the great Revolution in France, and of the decades that led up ...

In this landmark chronicle of the French Revolution, Schama deftly argues that the crisis arose not from the oppressed poor but from a rift among the elite over the speed of progress toward modernity and science, social and economic change.

In this passionate and provocative collection, the brilliant Simon Schama reveals his lighter, more playful side as he brings his keen critical sensibility to a wide range of topics. Captivating and informative, "Scribble, Scribble, Scribble" captures Schama's wit and acute observations as he holds ...

Passionate, provocative, entertaining and informative, "Scribble, Scribble, Scribble" ranges far and wide: from cookery and family to Barack Obama, from preaching and Shakespeare to Victorian sages, from Charlotte Rampling and Hurricane Katrina to 'The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of The Osbournes'....

The "New York Times" has hailed renowned historian and social commentator Simon Schama as a writer who "entwine[s] past and present into a meaningful, continuous whole." His deeply thoughtful and vastly knowledgeable books such as "The Power of Art," "The American Future," and the National Book Crit...

Nothing that has happened since the inauguration of Barack Obama has dispelled the sense that the election of 2008 was the kind of moment of truth in American politics and history that seldom comes along. Simon Schama, the acclaimed historian and award-winning critic, followed the campaign, but unli...

In this landmark chronicle of the French Revolution, Schama deftly argues that the crisis arose not from the oppressed poor but from a rift among the elite over the speed of progress toward modernity and science, social and economic change.

In this landmark chronicle of the French Revolution, Schama deftly argues that the crisis arose not from the oppressed poor but from a rift among the elite over the speed of progress toward modernity and science, social and economic change.

nd public lives brings listeners closer than ever to the striking reality of the French Revolution--exciting and terrifying, seductive and gruesome.