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
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The Jews invented a portable religion in the shape of the Bible, the Torah, and eventually the Talmud, and with other portable forms of writing. So it's now possible to carry the religion, that is embedded in that writing, away from the ruins of political and military power.
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Growing up in Britain as a rather loose Jew, the two things that didn't belong together were freedom and religious intensity. In America, they do. The Founding Fathers made a bet that if you didn't force everyone to profess religion in their own particular way, you could protect intellectual freedom, and religion would flourish.
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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.
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You are not thinking hard enough if you are sleeping well. And you would have to be unhinged to take on a subject like the French Revolution, or Rembrandt, and not feel some trepidation. There is always the possibility that you will crash and burn, and the whole thing will be a horrible, vulgar, self-indulgent mess.
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I am strongly of the opinion that chronology is very important. The great arc of time is what children are wired for.
history
It's not right to think about all of Jewish-German history as shrouded by the smoke of the crematorium.
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The challenge for a nonfiction writer is to achieve a poetic precision using the documents of truth but somehow to make people and places spring to life as if the reader was in their presence.
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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.
poetry
As a schoolboy, poetry seemed defined by preciousness. It was all very rarefied.
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We find a way (in each country) to contain our differences of opinion without annihilating one another.
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Charlie Hebdo: Satire was the father of true political freedom, born in the 18th century; the scourge of bigots and tyrants. Sing its praises.
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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....
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Even for the most excitable preacher, there was nothing inherently sinful about a waffle.
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These men were very much in the minority, but of course, being the 'Elect', they expected to be in a minority - the party of redemption. In fact they glorified in the slightness of their numbers, the self-purifying troop of Gideon's army... stormtroopers in the front line of the Reformation.