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
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.
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.
The most gloomy prognosis about Jewish life is that it will disappear between the two extremes of ultra-Orthodoxy on the one hand and total assimilation on the other. But those are very exaggerated scenarios.
Somehow, the words don't have any vitality, any life to them, unless I can feel it marking on a paper. That's how I start. Once I'm off, then I switch to the laptop. I think it would all just be prose if it started on a laptop - not that what I do is poetry.
Jews can live their own life as Jews and yet be part of a different country.
DIY, cricket, automobile repair. I could study it for a lifetime and not produce a word on the carburettor.
The Bible, for all its riches, is not a document of social history.
It was a conscious decision by (Sir Robert) Walpole and others to replace religion with making money. Elections replaced battles, and the fights were over party politics.
As a schoolboy, poetry seemed defined by preciousness. It was all very rarefied.
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.
In the Einstein way, I can't believe in a universe that doesn't have some sort of prime mover, identical with all of created nature. I have a whole lot of a harder time with supposing the fine print of the Torah was a direct revelation.
It's not right to think about all of Jewish-German history as shrouded by the smoke of the crematorium.
I am strongly of the opinion that chronology is very important. The great arc of time is what children are wired for.
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.