The difficulty with poetry is that it doesn't have the life that Shakespeare or Jane Austen have beyond the page. You can't… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
The challenge for a nonfiction writer is to achieve a poetic precision using the documents of truth but somehow to make people… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
“The existence of a temple of YHWH in Upper Egypt means one of two things for our understanding of what Jews were… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
Somehow, the words don't have any vitality, any life to them, unless I can feel it marking on a paper. That's how… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
“He was also deemed an irreproachable holy man who had returned to Antioch only when a life of self-mortification threatened to kill… — 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
Jews can live their own life as Jews and yet be part of a different country. — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
The most gloomy prognosis about Jewish life is that it will disappear between the two extremes of ultra-Orthodoxy on the one hand… — 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
