A good thematic piece of storytelling, highlighting interesting and often lesser known people, places and events in order to elucidate some of the general themes that make up American history. Schama beautifully interweaves history with a few anecdotes from his own experience, but never letting p...
Simon Schama ends his narrative history of Britain with this third volume, ‘The Fate of Empire’, covering the era 1776 to the millennium. This final volume is in itself a five star work; ending an overall five star series.At one point Schama recounts the young Churchill reading Macaulay and descr...
Volume II of Simon Schama’s History of Britain purports itself as, “The Wars of the British, 1603-1776” (Volume I presumably compasses the preceding 56 hundred-odd years), but it is in truth, and of necessity, something more than that. While the martial conflicts of that age were certainly of ce...
A lovely examination of the philosophy of the mind, the self, and the body. Not something I'd recommend to an entirely casual reader, for the tone is rather scholarly and geared more to someone with an interest in the subject, but for anyone who enjoys Roy Porter's work and Enlightenment philosop...
Was this country an archipelago or an empire, a republic or a monarchy? ‘Great Britain’ began as a grandiose fantasy in the head of James VI of Scotland and I of England, and ended as a startling imperial reality on the bloodied ramparts of Seringapatam. The confident chroniclers of the mind-bogg...
Shortly after the outbreak of war in 1939, the Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin, then living in Paris, offered a reading of a Paul Klee drawing he had bought eighteen years earlier. Klee had called his figure, suspended in a roughly sketched fiery void, Novus Angelus, the “New Angel.” And whil...
And he, perhaps, was its purest personification. Curzon was, at any rate, exceptionally, almost unnaturally, white. Someone who saw him in his prime as viceroy of India described him as having ‘the complexion of a milkmaid and the stature of Apollo’. (Years later, seeing Tommies bathing in the Fi...