From the very beginning, history wasn't content simply to be nostalgic fairytales; it wanted to make you think. — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
St. Paul was making it impossible to be Jewish and Christian at the same time. What is very striking about those early… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
I am not very relaxed about bad reviews. But I am resilient. I grieve, curse and swear, put on loud music, and… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
I am strongly of the opinion that chronology is very important. The great arc of time is what children are wired for. — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
As a schoolboy, poetry seemed defined by preciousness. It was all very rarefied. — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
I wrote a staggeringly bad poem when I was 19 after a girlfriend dumped me. I seem to remember comparing her to… — 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
In Mesopotamia or Egypt, for example, the monarch had a god-like religious status. But this is not the case in Judaism. So… — 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
