Achieve Quote by Simon Schama

“The challenge for a nonfiction writer is to achieve a poetic precision using the documents of truth but somehow to make people and places spring to life as if the reader was in their presence.”

Simon Schama

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Achieve Books Challenge Documents Life Make Nonfiction People Places Poetic Precision Presence Reader Somehow Spring Truth Using Writer Writing

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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…

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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…

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Taxation, the very thing that had triggered the British civil wars, would do so again, this time in America. The taxes may have been…

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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…

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In its Greek origins, historia meant inquiry, and from Thucydides onwards, the past has been studied to understand its connections with the present.

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Jewish history turns out not to be an either/or story - as in, either pure Judaism detached from its surroundings or else assimilation -…

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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…

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In the end, history, especially British history with its succession of thrilling illuminations, should be, as all her most accomplished narrators have promised, not…

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From 1789, perhaps even before that, it had been the willingness of politicians to exploit either the threat or the fact of violence that…

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The default mode of modern writing about art is to despise any notion of singularity as so much overheated genius-fetishism.

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The synagogues of late antiquity and the early medieval period were built around imagery: imagery of remembering the Temple, but also of the celestial…

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At 11, 12, I thought I was clumsy, ugly, a mess, an unappealing person, but I did have the gift of the gab. I…

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