History gives you insight of the same quality of truth as poetry or philosophy or a novel. — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
Charles was constitutionally incapable of being a constitutional monarch. — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
In the end, history, especially British history with its succession of thrilling illuminations, should be, as all her most accomplished narrators have… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
From the very beginning, history wasn't content simply to be nostalgic fairytales; it wanted to make you think. — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
Histories never conclude; they just pause their prose. Their stories are, if they are truthful, untidy affairs, resistant to windings-up and sortings-out.… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
In its Greek origins, historia meant inquiry, and from Thucydides onwards, the past has been studied to understand its connections with the… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
It's not right to think about all of Jewish-German history as shrouded by the smoke of the crematorium. — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
A generation without history is a generation that not only loses a nation's memory but loses a sense of what it's like… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
The Elephantine papyri - written as some of the books of the Bible are being written - is true social and legal… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
Almost everywhere else in Europe, the more military the state, the stronger the king - except in Britain. Here it was parliament,… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
The way history is currently taught in schools, jumping from Hitler to the Henrys, is like a nightmare vision of Star Wars,… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
Jewish history turns out not to be an either/or story - as in, either pure Judaism detached from its surroundings or else… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
Jewish history has been in my cultural DNA since I was a child growing up in post-war London. In the midst of… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
It takes a perverse determination to drain that instinctive curiosity away and make history seem just remote, dead and disconnected from our… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
In America, much foreign policy seems contrived to be an exercise in political theory with no attention to history whatsoever. Yet there's… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
The great theme of modern British history is the fate of freedom. The 18th century inherits, after the Civil War, this very… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
“Historians like a quiet life, and usually they get it. For the most part, history moves at a deliberate pace, working its… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
Taxation, the very thing that had triggered the British civil wars, would do so again, this time in America. The taxes may… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
“Likewise, Augustine made the effort of historical imagination to register to the full the Jewishness of Jesus and the apostles. And now,… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
These men were very much in the minority, but of course, being the 'Elect', they expected to be in a minority -… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
The irony about Charles II is not that he came to the throne because England needed a successor to Charles I, but… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
History is admirably dangerous. It is not the soft option. Teachers need to be grown up and brave. Sensitivity is fine, but… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
There are some places where history just grabs you by the jugular. This is one of them. — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
The history of the Jews has been written overwhelmingly by scholars of texts - understandably given the formative nature of the Bible… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
The novelist's obligation to remake the sensuous texture of a vanished world is also the historian's. The strongest fiction writers often do… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
To collude in the minimisation of British history on the grounds of its imagined irrelevance to our rebranded national future, or from… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
I actually think that history has fed off the restlessness of cyber space, of kind of the frantic, segmented nature of the… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
From the days of the Founding Fathers, right to this (2008) election, how and where America fights to defend its freedom, has… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
Histories never conclude; they just pause their prose. Their stories are, if they are truthful, untidy affairs, resistant to windings-up and sortings-out. They beat… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
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… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
Taxation, the very thing that had triggered the British civil wars, would do so again, this time in America. The taxes may have been… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
Anyone can write an academic piece directed at other academics. To write something that delivers an argument and a gripping storyline to someone's granny… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
In its Greek origins, historia meant inquiry, and from Thucydides onwards, the past has been studied to understand its connections with the present. — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
Jewish history turns out not to be an either/or story - as in, either pure Judaism detached from its surroundings or else assimilation -… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
Growing up in Britain as a rather loose Jew, the two things that didn't belong together were freedom and religious intensity. In America, they… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
In the end, history, especially British history with its succession of thrilling illuminations, should be, as all her most accomplished narrators have promised, not… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
From 1789, perhaps even before that, it had been the willingness of politicians to exploit either the threat or the fact of violence that… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
The default mode of modern writing about art is to despise any notion of singularity as so much overheated genius-fetishism. — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
The synagogues of late antiquity and the early medieval period were built around imagery: imagery of remembering the Temple, but also of the celestial… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
At 11, 12, I thought I was clumsy, ugly, a mess, an unappealing person, but I did have the gift of the gab. I… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
