Simon Schama

It takes a perverse determination to drain that instinctive curiosity away and make history seem just remote, dead and disconnected from our…

— Simon Schama

“The digital communications technology that was once imagined as a universe of transparent and perpetual illumination, in which cancerous falsehoods would perish…

— Simon Schama

“The impression given by the Bible is of a cyclical swing between the cult of many gods and the cult of a…

— Simon Schama

I understood when I was quite small that there were two special things about the Jews. That we'd endured for over 3,000…

— Simon Schama

I am not very relaxed about bad reviews. But I am resilient. I grieve, curse and swear, put on loud music, and…

— Simon Schama

“When imperial powers fray at the edges, ethnic groups perceived to be the beneficiaries of their trust suddenly start to look like…

— Simon Schama

“The year 388 saw an epidemic of mob attacks against synagogues all over the eastern empire including Alexandria, but especially fierce in…

— Simon Schama

Never crowd a pan with too many mushrooms. They give off an enormous amount of moisture. And there's nothing worse than a…

— Simon Schama

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

“. . .for the designated successor to royal authority, the Sovereign People, was no more capable than Louis XVI of reconciling freedom with power.”

— Simon Schama

“Historians like a quiet life, and usually they get it. For the most part, history moves at a deliberate pace, working its…

— Simon Schama

My mother was an awful cook, an exceptionally awful kosher cook, but I stayed kosher until I got to college, even though…

— Simon Schama

I am somebody who has never been able to give up '60s habits. I am the inevitable old codger on the dance…

— Simon Schama

I would passionately make the case that the harder the times, the more we need things that aren't just about keeping our…

— Simon Schama

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

I'm helplessly and permanently a Red Sox fan. It was like first love...You never forget. It's special. It's the first time I…

— Simon Schama

What can art really do in the face of atrocity?

— Simon Schama

The great theme of modern British history is the fate of freedom. The 18th century inherits, after the Civil War, this very…

— Simon Schama

Jews can live their own life as Jews and yet be part of a different country.

— Simon Schama

If someone asks me to go to speak at, say, Princeton, I might or might not go. But if someone asks me…

— Simon Schama

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

“That the two religions were engaged in a contested Passover–Easter dialogue at this formative moment is not in doubt. Even after the…

— Simon Schama

I do not want to be misunderstood that you need a dose of persecution in order, really, to have a sense of…

— Simon Schama

I find it very hard to write about Jewish history.

— Simon Schama

The Bible, for all its riches, is not a document of social history.

— Simon Schama