Simon Schama

A first installment in a two-part epic history of Britain chronicles the events that transpired from the birth of civilization through the conflict between Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots.

Simon Schama’s dramatic, broad-ranging, and immensely readable epic history of Britain reaches its triumphant conclusion in this third and final volume, which stretches from the American Revolution to the present.

Inside these pages lies the bloody epic of liberty, the British Iliad. The second volume of Simon Schama's A History of Britain brings the histories of Britain's civil wars - full of blighted idealism, shocking carnage, and unexpected outcomes - startlingly to life. These conflicts were fought unsparingly between the nations of the islands - Ireland, England, and Scotland - and between parliament and the crown. Shattering the illusion of a "united kingdom," they cost hundreds of thousands of lives: a greater proportion of the population than died in the First World War. When religious passion gave way to the equally consuming passion for profits, it became possible for the pieces of Britain to come together as the spectacularly successful business enterprise of "Britannia Incorporated." And in a few generations that business state expanded in a dizzying process that transformed what had been an obscure, off-shore footnote to Europe's great powers into the main event - the most powerful empire in the world. Yet somehow, it was the "wrong empire." The British considered it a bastion of liberty, yet it was based on military force and the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of Africans. In America, the emptiness of British claims to protect "freedom" was thrown back into the teeth of colonial governors and redcoat soldiers, while the likes of Sam Adams and George Washington inherited the mantle of Cromwell. Simon Schama grippingly evokes the horror of the battle, famine, and plague; the flames of burning cities; the pathos of broken families, with fathers and sons forced to choose opposing sides. But he also captures the intimacies of palace and parliament and the seductions of profit and pleasure. Geniuses like John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, and Benjamin Franklin stalk vividly through his pages, but so do Scottish clansmen, women pamphleteers, and literate, eloquent African slaves like Olaudah Equiano.

Instead of a dying Old Regime, Schama presents an ebullient country, vital & inventive, infatuated with novelty & technology. A fresh view of Louis XVI's France. A NY Times cloth bestseller. 200 illustrations.

On 13 September 1759, General James Wolfe, having led the British troops up the St. Lawrence River to victory in the Battle of Quebec, died on the Heights of Abraham. Schama examines this death, and how Wolfe was made to die again - through the spectacular painting by Benjamin West, and through the writings of the 19th-century historian Francis Parkman. Schama's second death concerns Parkman's uncle, George Parkman of Harvard Medical College, who disappeared in 1849 in mysterious circumstances and who was rumoured to have been murdered by a colleague. Through these incidents, Schama sheds light on the writing of history, the history of history, and the relationship of 'story' to 'history'.

Da millenni gli esseri umani e i virus coesistono e, suo malgrado, l'umanità più di una volta si è scoperta vulnerabile, stretta tra il terrore del contagio e l'ingegnosità della scienza. Soffermandosi in particolare su avvenimenti del XVIII e XIX secolo, Schama focalizza la propria ricerca su un tema ancora oggi attuale, ossia il sospetto e i pregiudizi che da sempre hanno accompagnato tanto l'insorgere di inattese epidemie quanto le nuove scoperte scientifiche volte a scongiurarne gli effetti peggiori. Infatti, diverse malattie infettive dilagarono nelle affollate città il vaiolo colpì Londra, il colera infestò Parigi, la peste flagellò l'India. Il compito della nascente scienza medica? Fermare la mortalità. Per raccontare quella frenetica battaglia per salvare quante più vite umane possibili, Schama presenta un'incredibile sequenza di personaggi e di storie. Tra queste, la triste parabola di un eroe quasi sconosciuto, Waldemar Haffkine. Scienziato ebreo di Odessa e microbiologo presso l'Istituto Pasteur, Haffkine sviluppò il primo vaccino contro il colera e, trasferitosi in India, fu pioniere di una serie di studi scientifici che contribuirono a immunizzare milioni di persone. Acclamato in Inghilterra come «salvatore dell'umanità», fu però vittima di un atto di scioccante ingiustizia che mise fine alla sua brillante carriera. Nel ripercorrere la lunga storia della lotta tra l'uomo e i virus, Schama trova lo spunto per difendere la propria incrollabile certezza che esista un legame profondo e inscindibile che ci unisce alla natura e alla nostra specie. Alla fine, sostiene Schama, affrontiamo alcune sfide del nostro tempo insieme, come la lotta contro le infezioni pericolose. In quei momenti, «non ci sono estranei, ma solo amici un'unica preziosa catena di connessioni». Attraversando i confini tra Oriente e Occidente, Schama conduce il lettore in un viaggio nel tempo che racconta molto del nostro presente, dimostrando come la lotta alle epidemie sia un compito non solo scientifico, ma anche politico, culturale e personale.

One of Time Magazine's Best Books of the YearIn Landscape and Memory 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. "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

Until now Rembrandt has eluded his biographers. The scarcity of documentary evidence on the one hand and the enormous scale of his artistic achievement on the other have left us at once dazzled and bereft. Now, after more than twenty years of work, Simon Schama has managed to combine an absolute mastery of the painter's life and times with an unprecedented sympathy for Rembrandt's character as it found both expression and transformation in his art. The result is enthralling as biography and as history, but above all it amounts to the first reconstruction of Rembrandt's genius that does full justice to its subject.

At the apogee of its powers in the seventeenth century, Holland was a tiny island of prosperity in a sea of want. Its homes were well-furnished and fanatically clean; its citizens feasted on 100-course banquets and speculated fortunes on new varieties of tulip. Yet, in the midst of plenty, the Dutch were ill at ease. In this brilliantly innovative book--which launched his reputation as one of our most perspicacious and stylish historians--Simon Schama explores the mysterious contradictions of a nation that invented itself from the ground up, attained an unprecedented level of affluence, and lived in dread of being corrupted by its happiness. Drawing on a vast array of period documents and sumptuously reproduced art, Schama re-creates, in precise and loving detail, a nation's mental furniture. He tells of bloody uprisings and beached whales, of the cult of hygiene and the plague of tobacco, of thrifty housewives and profligate tulip-speculators. He tells us how the Dutch celebrated themselves and how they were slandered by their enemies. The Embarrassment of Riches is a book that set a standard for its discipline; it throbs with life on every page.

Simon Schama brings Britain to life through its portraits, as seen in the five-part BBC series The Face of Britain and the major National Portrait Gallery exhibitionChurchill and his painter locked in a struggle of stares and glares; Gainsborough watching his daughters run after a butterfly; a black Othello in the nineteenth century, the poet-artist Rossetti trying to capture on canvas what he couldn't possess in life, a surgeon-artist making studies of wounded faces brought in from the Battle of the Somme; a naked John Lennon five hours before his death.In the age of the hasty glance and the selfie, Simon Schama has written a tour de force about the long exchange of looks from which British portraits have been made over the centuries: images of the modest and the mighty; of friends and lovers; heroes and working people. Each of them - the image-maker, the subject, and the rest of us who get to look at them - are brought unforgettably to life. Together they build into a collective picture of Britain, our past and our present, a look into the mirror of our identity at a moment when we are wondering just who we are. Combining his two great passions, British history and art history, for the first time, Schama's extraordinary storytelling reveals the truth behind the nation's most famous portrayals of power, love, fame, the self, and the people. Mesmerising in its breadth and its panache, and beautifully illustrated, with more than 150 images from the National Portrait Gallery, The Face of Britain will change the way we see our past - and ourselves.

'Great art has dreadful manners...' Simon Schama observes at the start of his epic exploration of the power, and whole point, of art. 'The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are polite things, visions that soothe, charm and beguile, but actually they are thugs. Merciless and wily, the greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your sense of reality...' With the same disarming force, The Power of Art jolts us far from the comfort zone of the hushed art gallery, as Schama closes in on intense make-or-break turning points in the lives of eight great artists who, under extreme stress, created something unprecedented, altering the course of art for ever. The embattled heroes - Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso and Rothko - faced crisis with steadfast defiance. The masterpieces they created challenged convention, shattered complacency, shifted awareness and changed the way we look at the world. With powerfully vivid story-telling, Schama explores the dynamic personalities of the artists and the spirit of the times they lived through, capturing the flamboyant theatre of bourgeois life in Amsterdam, the passion and paranoia of Revolutionary Paris, and the carnage and pathos of civil-war Spain.

In this magnificently illustrated cultural history—the tie-in to the PBS and BBC series The Story of the Jews—Simon Schama details the story of the Jewish experience, tracing it across three millennia, from their beginnings as an ancient tribal people to the opening of the New World in 1492 to the modern day.It is a story like no other: an epic of endurance against destruction, of creativity in oppression, joy amidst grief, the affirmation of life against the steepest of odds.It spans the millennia and the continents—from India to Andalusia and from the bazaars of Cairo to the streets of Oxford. It takes you to unimagined places: to a Jewish kingdom in the mountains of southern Arabia; a Syrian synagogue glowing with radiant wall paintings; the palm groves of the Jewish dead in the Roman catacombs. And its voices ring loud and clear, from the severities and ecstasies of the Bible writers to the love poems of wine bibbers in a garden in Muslim Spain.In The Story of the Jews, the Talmud burns in the streets of Paris, massed gibbets hang over the streets of medieval London, a Majorcan illuminator redraws the world; candles are lit, chants are sung, mules are packed, ships loaded with spice and gems founder at sea.And a great story unfolds. Not—as often imagined—of a culture apart, but of a Jewish world immersed in and imprinted by the peoples among whom they have dwelled, from the Egyptians to the Greeks, from the Arabs to the Christians.Which makes the story of the Jews everyone's story, too.

In this magnificently illustrated cultural history--the tie-in to the PBS and BBC series 'The Story of the Jews'--Simon Schama details the story of the Jewish experience, tracing it across three millennia, from their beginnings as an ancient tribal people to the opening of the New World in 1492 to the modern day. It is a story like no other: an epic of endurance against destruction, of creativity in oppression, joy amidst grief, the affirmation of life against the steepest of odds. It spans the millennia and the continents--from India to Andalusia and from the bazaars of Cairo to the streets of Oxford. It takes you to unimagined places: to a Jewish kingdom in the mountains of southern Arabia; a Syrian synagogue glowing with radiant wall paintings; the palm groves of the Jewish dead in the Roman catacombs. And its voices ring loud and clear, from the severities and ecstasies of the Bible writers to the love poems of wine bibbers in a garden in Muslim Spain. In The Story of the Jews, the Talmud burns in the streets of Paris, massed gibbets hang over the streets of medieval London, a Majorcan illuminator redraws the world; candles are lit, chants are sung, mules are packed, ships loaded with spice and gems founder at sea. And a great story unfolds. Not--as often imagined--of a culture apart, but of a Jewish world immersed in and imprinted by the peoples among whom they have dwelled, from the Egyptians to the Greeks, from the Arabs to the Christians. Which makes the story of the Jews everyone's story, too.

It is a story like no other: an epic of endurance against destruction, of creativity in oppression, joy amidst grief, the affirmation of life against the steepest of odds. It spans the millennia and the continents - from India to Andalusia and from the bazaars of Cairo to the streets of Oxford. It takes you to unimagined places: to a Jewish kingdom in the mountains of southern Arabia; a Syrian synagogue glowing with radiant wall paintings; the palm groves of the Jewish dead in the Roman catacombs. And its voices ring loud and clear, from the severities and ecstasies of the Bible writers to the love poems of wine bibbers in a garden in Muslim Spain. And a great story unfolds. Not - as often imagined - of a culture apart, but of a Jewish world immersed in and imprinted by the peoples among whom they have dwelled, from the Egyptians to the Greeks, from the Arabs to the Christians. Which makes the story of the Jews everyone's story, too.

In the second of two volumes of this magnificently illustrated cultural history--the tie-in to the PBS and BBC series The Story of the Jews--Simon Schama details the story of the Jewish people, spanning from their expulsion from Spain in the Inquisition across six hundred years to the present day.It is a story like no other: an epic of endurance against destruction, of creativity in the face of oppression, joy amidst grief, the affirmation of life against the steepest of odds. It spans the centuries and the continents--from the Iberian Peninsula and the collapse of “the golden age” to the shtetls of Russia to the dusty streets of infant Hollywood. Its voices ring loud and clear, from the philosophical musings of Spinoza to the poetry written on slips of paper in concentraion camps. Within these pages, the Enlightenment unfolds, a great diaspora transforms a country, a Viennese psychaiatrist forever changes the conception of the human mind. And a great story unfolds. Not--as often imagined--of a culture apart, but of a Jewish world immersed in and imprinted by the peoples among whom they have dwelled, from the Egyptians to the Greeks, from the Arabs to the Christians, from the Soviets to America. Which makes the story of the Jews everyone’s story, too.

לאחר הכרך הראשון של הסיפור של היהודים, שתיאר את ההיסטוריה היהודית מראשיתה ועד סוף המאה ה-15, הכרך השני הזה מוביל אותנו עד ראשית הציונות ותחילת העליות לארץ ישראל, בסוף המאה ה-19. במכחול רחב־תנועה ובוטח מצייר סיימון שאמה את פיזורם של יהודי ספרד ופורטוגל ברחבי העולם הישן והחדש, ואת עלייתן של קהילות חדשות לצד שקיעתן של אחרות. וכרגיל בתיאוריו הססגוניים, ניחוחות התבשילים מתערבבים עם צלילי הלחנים וריחות שוקי הבגדים, וקולות התפילה והפלפול התלמודי נמזגים עם מלמולי המסחר והעסקים. בין שגיבורו של פרק הוא משיח־לשעה כמו דויד הראובני או גבירה כל־יכולה כדוֹנה גרציה נשיא; מלחין מבריק כמו סַלָמוֹנֶה רוֹסי או רב חדשן כמו יהודה ליאוֹנֶה ממוֹדֶנָה; מתאגרף יהודי לונדוני בשם דניאל מֶנְדוֹזָה או אבי ההשכלה היהודית משה מנדלסון; גיבור בעל־כורחו כמו אלפרד דרייפוס או איש חזון כתיאודור הרצל – האופן שבו שאמה מספר דרכו את סיפורה של קהילה או תנועה שלמה הוא תמיד סוחף, מרתק, מלא מעורבות ורגש, סיפור של עולם יהודי הטובל כולו בתרבות העמים שבהם הוא יושב. זהו לא רק סיפור של גירושים ופרעות, אלא סיפור של חיים עתירי עשייה, מלאי יצירה. סיימון שאמה הוא פרופסור לתולדות האמנות ולהיסטוריה באוניברסיטת קולומביה. רבים מספריו זכו בפרסים ותורגמו ל-15 לשונות. בין ספריו: אזרחים, נוף וזיכרון, עיניו של רמברנדט, ההיסטוריה של בריטניה, כוחה של האמנות, מסעות בים סוער, וכן העתיד האמריקאי. מאמרים פרי־עטו בענייני אמנות, פוליטיקה וספרות מתפרסמים בעיתונים מובילים וזוכים לתהודה נרחבת. שאמה כתב והגיש ארבעים סרטים ל על שלל נושאים, ובהם טולסטוי, פוליטיקה אמריקאית ושייקספיר, וזכה בפרס האֶמי על התוכנית 'כוחה של האמנות'. "שאמה הוא מספר־סיפורים גאוני". The Times "סיימון שאמה הוא ענק, הוא מכונת חשיבה עצומה וגם משורר שמילותיו זהב". Brian Masters, מייל און סאנדיי "הסיפור של היהודים הוא מופת של כתיבה פופולרית של היסטוריה, צירוף של מעורבות אישית עם נאמנות קפדנית לעובדות ולמחקר העדכני." The New York Times "שאמה מפורסם בברק של הסגנון שלו, ברוחב המדהים של למדנותו [...] כתיבתו מגלה ממש חרדה מפני המחשבה שמישהו ישתעמם." New York Review of Books