Book description
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 endurance, its counter-point, seen from the
twenty-first, must be alteration.'
Change - sometimes gentle and subtle, sometimes shocking and violent
- is the dynamic of Schama's unapologetically personal and grippingly
written history, especially the changes that wash over custom and
habit, transforming our loyalties. At the heart of this history lie
questions of compelling importance for Britain's future as well as its
past: what makes or breaks a nation? To whom do we give our allegiance
and why? And where do the boundaries of our community lie - in our
hearth and home, our village or city, tribe or faith? What is Britain
- one country or many? Has British history unfolded 'at the edge of
the world' or right at the heart of it?
Schama delivers these themes in a form that is at once traditional
and excitingly fresh. The great and the wicked are here - Becket and
Thomas Cromwell, Robert the Bruce and Anne Boleyn - but so are
countless more ordinary lives: an Irish monk waiting for the plague to
kill him in his cell at Kilkenny; a small boy running through the
streets of London to catch a glimpse of Elizabeth I. They are all
caught on the rich and teeming canvas on which Schama paints his
brilliant portrait of the life of the British people: 'for 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.
Simon Schama
is University Professor of Art History and History at Columbia
University and the prize-winning author of fourteen books, which have
been translated into twenty languages. They include
The Embarrassment
of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age
;
Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution
;
Landscape and Memory
;
Rembrandt's Eyes
;
Rough Crossings
,
which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; and most recently,
The American Future: A History
. He has written widely on music, art, politics and food for the
Guardian
,
Vogue
and the
New Yorker
. His award-winning television work as writer and presenter for the BBC
stretches over two decades and includes the fifteen-part
A History of Britain
series; the Emmy-winning
Power of Art
and
The American Future: A History
which
appeared on BBC2 in autumn 2008.
