Simon Schama
Simon Schama
Simon Michael Schama, CBEis an English historian specializing in art history, Dutch history, and French history. He is a University Professor of History and Art History at Columbia University, New York. He first came to popular public attention with his history of the French Revolution titled Citizens, published in 1989. In the United Kingdom, he is perhaps best known for writing and hosting the 15-part BBC television documentary series A History of Britain broadcast between 2000 and 2002...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth13 February 1945
My mother was an awful cook, an exceptionally awful kosher cook, but I stayed kosher until I got to college, even though I'd long stopped believing in God.
A terrible vanity, really, but as you get older...
I used to have a monthly cookery column, and am a big cook, so that whole sense of connecting what one does with food to one's cultural identity has always been fascinating to me.
It was the Sephardi Jews who brought fish and chips to Britain, actually, believe it or not, from the Mediterranean world. Apart from actually eating and selling fish and chips, they were kind of debt enforcers.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the stereotype of the ugly American - voracious, preachy, mercenary, and bombastically chauvinist - was firmly in place in Europe.
Sculptures created from found materials like ice and thorns, driftwood, and even bleached kangaroo bones all presuppose that artistic design will yield to the cycles of time and climate, whether over an hour or a decade.
The difficulty with poetry is that it doesn't have the life that Shakespeare or Jane Austen have beyond the page. You can't make a costume drama out of it. There's no place for it to go except trapped inside its little book.
A generation without history is a generation that not only loses a nation's memory but loses a sense of what it's like to be inside a human skin.
As a schoolboy, poetry seemed defined by preciousness. It was all very rarefied.
Histories never conclude; they just pause their prose. Their stories are, if they are truthful, untidy affairs, resistant to windings-up and sortings-out. They beat raggedly on into the future....
Even for the most excitable preacher, there was nothing inherently sinful about a waffle.
DIY, cricket, automobile repair. I could study it for a lifetime and not produce a word on the carburettor.
Irreverence is the lifeblood of freedom.
In the end, history, especially British history with its succession of thrilling illuminations, should be, as all her most accomplished narrators have promised, not just instruction but pleasure.