An Interview with Simon Schama
Daniel Snowman meets the celebrated telly-don and historian of 17th-century Holland, 18th-century France and America, all of British history and much else besides.
I have just read, or re-read, some 6,000 pages of history. Not all of Simon Schama’s published oeuvre; but most of most of his books. Not that there are that many of them. But several are journeyings across vast cultural landscapes, Grand Tours of the mind. You embark upon The Embarrassment of Riches, Citizens, Landscape and Memory or Rembrandt’s Eyes in the spirit of old-time travellers boarding the Trans-Siberian or Orient Express. These are Big Books. Reading, as Roy Porter famously pointed out, can be bad for your health and (how shall I put this delicately?) my lap is just recovering from having supported, day after day, some 2.5 concentrated kilos of Schama’s Rembrandt in hardback. I did wonder at one point whether it might not be safer to chain the book up like a medieval bible and read it standing up.
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