Simon Schama Books

Set during the French Revolution, the two cities in question are Paris and London and the tale is one of the tragedies that take place therein.

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).

An extraordinary book that explores how the earth itself has shaped the Western imagination and how, as a result, our interaction with the environment is far richer and more complex than today's doomsayers would have us believe.

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.

This text explores the enigma of 17th-century Holland, a nation that attained an unprecedented level of affluence, yet lived in constant dread of being corrupted by prosperity