Simon Schama is renowned for his captivating narrative style, bringing history and art to life with vibrant prose and compelling storytelling. His work is characterized by a flair for description that makes even arcane subjects accessible, drawing readers into the past with vivid detail and engaging language. While celebrated for his ability to connect with a broad audience, his approach sometimes invites criticism of subjectivity and populism from academic circles. Schama's method emphasizes the importance of narrative and stylistic flair, aiming to evoke the atmosphere and historical context rather than merely presenting facts.
Classic / British English This great story is set against the background of the French Revolution. Two men -- one French, one English, but very similar in appearance -- are in love with the same woman. The three of them, like the people of France, are faced with the dangers of life at a time when the guillotine never rests.
This dazzling, unconventional biography shows us why, more than three centuries after his death, Rembrandt continues to exert such a hold on our imagination. Deeply familiar to us through his enigmatic self-portraits, few facts are known about the Leiden miller's son who tasted brief fame before facing financial ruin (he was even forced to sell his beloved wife Saskia's grave). The true biography of Rembrandt, as Simon Schama demonstrates, is to be discovered in his pictures. Interweaving of seventeenth-century Holland, Schama allows us to see Rembrandt in a completely fresh and original way.
The words that failed were words of hope. But they did not fail at all times and everywhere. These gripping pages teem with words of defiance and optimism, sounds and images of tenacious life and adventurous modernism, music and drama, business and philosophy, poetry and politics.
Simon Schama sets out to discover which story, if any story, is the story of the many stories of the disappearance of Doctor George Parkman, the perfect Yankee. Plus: William Boyd, Geoffrey Wolff, Louise Erdrich, Don DeLillo, Amitav Ghosh, and Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (part two).
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE Selected as a Book of the Year 2017 by the Daily Telegraph, Mail on Sunday and Observer 'A glittering gemstone of a book' The TimesThe Jewish story is a history that is about, and for, all of us.
A Time Magazine Best Books of the Year. In Landscape and Memory, award-winning author Simon Schama ranges over continents and centuries to reveal the psychic claims that human beings have made on nature. He tells of the Nazi cult of the primeval German forest; the play of Christian and pagan myth in Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers; and the duel between a monumental sculptor and a feminist gadfly on the slopes of Mount Rushmore. The result is a triumphant work of history, naturalism, mythology, and art, as encyclopedic as The Golden Bough and as irresistibly readable as Schama's own Citizens. "A work of great ambition and enormous intellectual scope...consistently provocative and revealing."--New York Times "Extraordinary...a summary cannot convey the riches of this book. It will absorb, instruct, and fascinate."--New York Review of Books
Schama completes his three-volume history of Britain to accompany the BBC TV series. This period, 1770-2000, covers a variety of themes and key British characters. First, the Romantic generation turned Nature into a revolutionary force, followed by the creative Victorians seeking a better world.
Simon Schama explores the forces that tore Britain apart during two centuries of dynamic change - transforming outlooks, allegiances and boundaries. But as wars of religious passions gave way to campaigns for profit, the British people did come together in the imperial enterprise of 'Britannia Incorporated'.
A wide-ranging collection of essays written by the award-winning writer and historian over his forty-year career, chosen by the man himself.
'History clings tight but it also kicks loose,' writes Simon Schama at the outset of At the Edge of the World?, the first book in his three-volume journey into Britain's past. And change - sometimes gentle and subtle, sometimes shocking and violent - is the dynamic of Schama's unapologetically personal and grippingly written history.
