Simon Schama

The Power of Art

Explores the French Revolution in terms of the vitality and infatuation with technology that motivated French citizenry toward change and the conflicting, strained economics frustrating their visions for France

A Chronicle of the French Revolution

Citizens

Simon Schama's Story of the Jews will be one of the most discussed books of 2013. It is a landmark history of a culture, a people, a world from the time of Moses to our own, and is accompanied by a major BBC television series. The Jewish story it tells reaches from Brooklyn to Berlin and includes passages to India, slow boats to China, and sojourns is Greece, Glasgow, Montreal and beyond. And its richly-peopled intellectual territory stretches from the Hebrew's invention of a single God to Jewish responsibility for killing the saviour, to currents of dispossession, destruction and diaspora, and ever onwards to the birth of modernism and the horrors of the twentieth century. But this is also a raucous, characterful history taking in the Jewish joke, Jewish sportsmen, Yiddish theatre, painting and music. The Story of the Jews is an indispensable work of world history by one of our most distinguished, versatile and electrifying historians.

Finding the words, 1000 BCE - 1492 CE

The Story of the Jews

LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE The Jewish story is a history that is about, and for, all of us. And in our own time of anxious arrivals and enforced departures, the Jews' search for a home is more startlingly resonant than ever. Belonging is a magnificent cultural history abundantly alive with energy, character and colour. It spans centuries and continents, from the Jews' expulsion from Spain in 1492 it navigates miracles and massacres, wandering, discrimination, harmony and tolerance; to the brink of the twentieth century and, it seems, a point of profound hope. It tells the stories not just of rabbis and philosophers but of a poetess in the ghetto of Venice; a boxer in Georgian England; a general in Ming China; an opera composer in nineteenth-century Germany. The story unfolds in Kerala and Mantua, the starlit hills of Galilee, the rivers of Colombia, the kitchens of Istanbul, the taverns of Ukraine and the mining camps of California. It sails in caravels, rides the stage coaches and the railways; trudges the dawn streets of London, hobbles along with the remnant of Napoleon's ruined army. Through Schama's passionate telling of this second chronicle in an epic tale, a history emerges of the Jewish people that feels it is the story of everyone, of humanity.

The Story of the Jews, 1492-1900

Belonging

"Great art has dreadful manners," Simon Schama observes wryly at the start of his epic and explosive 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 propels us on an eye-opening, breathtaking odyssey, zooming in on eight extraordinary masterpieces, from Caravaggio's David and Goliath to Picasso's Guernica. Jolting us far from the comfort zone of the hushed art gallery, 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 forever. The embattled heroes—Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso and Rothko—each in his own resolute way, faced crisis with steadfast defiance, pitting passion and conviction against scorn and short-sightedness. The masterpieces they created challenged convention, shattered complacency, shifted awareness and changed the way we look at the world. With vivid storytelling and powerfully evocative descriptive passages, 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. Most compelling of all, The Power of Art traces the extraordinary evolution of eight "eye-popping" world-class works of art. Created in a bolt of illumination, such works "tell us something about how the world is, how it is to be inside our skins, that no more prosaic source of wisdom can deliver. And when they do that, they answer, irrefutably and majestically, the nagging question of every reluctant art-conscript . . . 'OK, OK, but what's art really for?'"

Describes the cultural and social milieu of seventeenth-century Holland, where, despite great material wealth and general prosperity, an "anxiety of superabundance" permeated all aspects of the culture

An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age

The Embarrassment of Riches

"A sumptuous feast of a book exploring the real and imagined landscapes of Western history ... Study through European history relating how ecology & environment has shaped culture & thinking."--Abebooks website.

Landscape and Memory: The waters of Isis : the Thames and the Nile

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.

At the Edge of the World? 3000 B.C.--A.D. 1603

History of Britain, A - Volume I

For Rembrandt, as for Shakespeare, all the world was indeed a stage, and he knew in exhaustive detail the tactics of its performance: the strutting and mincing, the wardrobe and face-paint, the full repertoire and gesture and gimace, the flutter of hands and the roll of the eyes, the belly-laugh and the half-stifled sob. He knew what it looked like to seduce, to intimidate, to wheedle and to console; to strike a pose or preach a sermon, to shake a fist or uncover a breast; and how to sin and how to atone. No artist had ever been so fascinated by the fashioning of personae, beginning with his own. No painter ever looked with such unsparing intelligence or such bottomless compassion at our entrances and our exits and the whole rowdy show in between.

Rembrandt's Eyes

The Wars of the British 1603-1776

A History of Britain, Volume II

Pandemics, Vaccines, and the Health of Nations

Foreign Bodies

The Fate of Empire 1776-2000

A History of Britain

Churchill and his painter locked in a struggle of stares and glares; Gainsborough watching his daughters run after a butterfly; a naked John Lennon five hours before his death. Simon Schama has written a tour de force about British portraits over the centuries in which the image-maker, the subject and everyone else looking on are brought unforgettably to life. Mesmerising in its extraordinary storytelling, and beautifully illustrated, The Face of Britainwill change the way we see our past - and ourselves.

A History of the Nation Through Its Portraits

The Face of Britain

A noted historian explores a little-known event in American history where thousands of slaves escaped Southern slavery to give their allegiance to King George during the Revolution, only to be betrayed by the Crown.

Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution

Rough Crossings

A vibrant cultural history investigating the tangled and complex history of pandemics and vaccines, by bestselling author and historian Simon Schama With the devastating effects of Covid-19 still rattling the foundations of our global civilization, we live in unprecedented times – or so we might think. But pandemics have been a constant presence throughout human history, as humans and disease have lived side by side for millennia. Over the centuries, our ability to react to these sweeping killers has evolved, most notably through the development of vaccines. The story of disease eradication, however, has never been one of simply science – it is political, cultural, and deeply personal. Ranging across continents and centuries, acclaimed historian Simon Schama unpacks the stories of the often-unknown individuals whose pioneering work changed the face of modern healthcare. Questioning why the occurrence of pandemics appears to be accelerating at an alarming rate, Schama looks into our impact on the natural world, and how that in turn is affecting us, all while interrogating how geopolitics has had a devastating effect on global health. Inspirational and tragic by turns, these are stories of success and failure, of collaboration and of persecution, as humanity struggles to work together in the face of one of our most deadly shared enemies: the pandemic.

Roland Barthes

Cy Twombly

Fifty Years Of Works On Paper

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 people, tracing their experience across three millennia, from their beginnings as an ancient tribal people to the opening of the new world in 1492 It is a story like no other: an epic of endurance in the face of destruction, of creativity in the face of oppression, joy amidst grief, the affirmation of life despite 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 gems and spices 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.

Finding the Words 1000 BC-1492 AD

Story of the Jews, The

A History

The American Future

'Wednesday brought a pungent sheepy smell emanating from the greyish lamb and barley soup my mother optimistically called 'Taste of the Garden of Eden'. Expel me, please. Haddock in the air? That would be Thursday. The faintest whiff of roasting garlic? That would be what my sister and I uncharitably dubbed 'Friday Night Memorial Chicken'; a venerable object smeared on the breasts with a dab of marmite meant to cheer the bird up as it emerged defeated from the oven. Rattling inside the brittle cavity was that one solitary clove of garlic; the exotic knobble that my mother conceded as a romantic touch amid the iron regimen of her unvarying weekly routine.' Cookery is not necessarily a subject one immediately associates with Simon Schama - one of Britain's most distinguished historians and commentators. But this selection of his occasional writings is a treasure trove of surprises. Passionate, provocative, entertaining and informative, Scribble, Scribble, Scribble ranges far and wide: from cookery and family to Barack Obama, from preaching and Shakespeare to Victorian sages, from Charlotte Rampling and Hurricane Katrina to 'The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of The Osbournes'. Never predictable, always stimulating, Scribble, Scribble, Scribble allows us to view the world, in all its diversity, through the eyes of one of its most original inhabitants.

Writings on Ice Cream, Obama, Churchill, and My Mother

Scribble, Scribble, Scribble

Simon Schama's study of the Netherlands from 1780--1813, this is a tale of a once-powerful nation's desparate struggle to survive the treacheries and brutality of European war and politics.

Simon Schama

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