‘This splendid and often moving work of history… Schama has a gift for combining novelistically colourful detail, serious analysis and wryly amusing asides’ Daily Telegraph   ‘Superb’ Observer   ‘Extraordinary… A meticulous retelling of a terrible yet scientifically innovative period… Makes an urgent case for building a better future on our toxic past’ Guardian   ‘This is history of the best sort – humanly engaged but never sentimental’ Mail on Sunday  Cities and countries engulfed by panic and death, desperate for vaccines but fearful of what inoculation may bring. This is what the world has just gone through with Covid-19. But as Simon Schama shows in his epic history of vulnerable humanity caught between the terror of contagion and the ingenuity of science, it has happened before.    Characteristically, with Schama the message is delivered through gripping, page-turning stories set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: smallpox strikes London; cholera hits Paris; plague comes to India. Threading through the scenes of terror, suffering and hope – in hospitals and prisons, palaces and slums – are an unforgettable cast of characters: a philosopher-playwright burning up with smallpox in a country chateau; a vaccinating doctor paying house calls in Halifax; a woman doctor in south India driving her inoculator-carriage through the stricken streets as dead monkeys drop from the trees. But we are also in the labs when great, life-saving breakthroughs happen, in Paris, Hong Kong and Mumbai.   At the heart of it all, an unsung hero: Waldemar Haffkine. A gun-toting Jewish student in Odesa turned microbiologist at the Pasteur Institute, hailed in England as ‘the saviour of mankind’ for vaccinating millions against cholera and bubonic plague in British India while being cold-shouldered by the medical establishment of the Raj. Creator of the world’s first mass production line of vaccines in Mumbai, he is tragically brought down in an act of shocking injustice.   Foreign Bodies crosses borders between east and west, Asia and Europe, the worlds of rich and poor, politics and science. Its thrilling story carries with it the credo of its author on the interconnectedness of humanity and nature; of the powerful and the people. Ultimately, Schama says, as we face the challenges of our times together, ‘there are no foreigners, only familiars’.

Nothing that has happened since the inauguration of Barack Obama has dispelled the sense that the election of 2008 was the kind of moment of truth in American politics and history that seldom comes along. Simon Schama, the acclaimed historian and award-winning critic, followed the campaign, but unlike other accounts, "The American Future" looks at that contemporary moment through the window of time. In four areas critical to the fate of the American republic--war; the place of religion in politics and culture; immigration; and the tenacious grip of expectations of permanent abundance--Schama looks back to see more clearly into the future. Full of lost insights and spellbinding tales, discovering men and women who have been forgotten in the big record, "The American Future" showcases Schama's unique gift of storytelling, ensuring these eloquent voices will be heard again as the nation moves forward into an uncertain moment in its history.

Written by a team of noted historians, these essays explore how ten 20th-century intellectuals and social reformers sought to adapt such familiar Victorian values as "civilisation", "domesticity", "conscience" and "improvement" to modern conditions of democracy, feminism and mass culture. Covering such figures as J.M. Keynes, E.M. Forster and Lord Reith of the BBC, these interdisciplinary studies scrutinize the children of the Victorians at a time when their private assumptions and public positions were under increasing strain in a rapidly changing world. "After the Victorians" is written in honour of the late Professor John Clive of Harvard, and uses, as he did, the method of biography to connnect the public and private lives of the generations who came after the Victorians. Peter Mandler is also author of "Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals, 1830-1852", and editor of "The Uses of Charity: The Poor on Relief in the 19th Century Metropolis".

One of Time Magazine's Best Books of the Year


In Landscape and Memory Schama ranges over continents and centuries to reveal the psychic claims that human beings have made on nature. He tells of the Nazi cult of the primeval German forest; the play of Christian and pagan myth in Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers; and the duel between a monumental sculptor and a feminist gadfly on the slopes of Mount Rushmore. The result is a triumphant work of history, naturalism, mythology, and art.



"A work of great ambition and enormous intellectual scope...consistently provocative and revealing."--New York Times


"Extraordinary...a summary cannot convey the riches of this book. It will absorb, instruct, and fascinate."--New York Review of Books

Cities and countries engulfed by panic and death, desperate for vaccines but fearful of what inoculation may bring. This is what the world has just gone through with Covid-19. But as Simon Schama shows in his epic history of vulnerable humanity caught between the terror of contagion and the ingenuity of science, it has happened before.    Characteristically, with Schama the message is delivered through gripping, page-turning stories set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: smallpox strikes London; cholera hits Paris; plague comes to India. Threading through the scenes of terror, suffering and hope – in hospitals and prisons, palaces and slums – are an unforgettable cast of characters: a philosopher-playwright burning up with smallpox in a country chateau; a vaccinating doctor paying house calls in Halifax; a woman doctor in south India driving her inoculator-carriage through the stricken streets as dead monkeys drop from the trees. But we are also in the labs when great, life-saving breakthroughs happen, in Paris, Hong Kong and Mumbai.   At the heart of it all, an unsung hero: Waldemar Haffkine. A gun-toting Jewish student in Odesa turned microbiologist at the Pasteur Institute, hailed in England as ‘the saviour of mankind’ for vaccinating millions against cholera and bubonic plague in British India while being cold-shouldered by the medical establishment of the Raj. Creator of the world’s first mass production line of vaccines in Mumbai he is tragically brought down in an act of shocking injustice.   Foreign Bodies crosses borders between east and west, Asia and Europe, the worlds of rich and poor, politics and science. Its thrilling story carries with it the credo of its author on the interconnectedness of humanity and nature; of the powerful and the people. Ultimately, Schama says, as we face the challenges of our times together, ‘there are no foreigners, only familiars’.

Recognized as one of the greatest and most idiosyncratic artists of the postwar era, Cy Twombly left behind an oeuvre of incredible versatility, sensitivity and originality upon his death in 2011 at age 83. Working in the immediate aftermath of Abstract Expressionism, Twombly developed an intensely personal scription consisting of scrawled letters and words, in an effusive, calligraphic mark-making that suggests a kind of painted poetry. Working across painting, drawing, sculpture and photography with a restless energy, Twombly incorporated the gods of Ancient Greece, the poetry of Stephane Mallarme and the history, culture and mythology of the Occident into his art. "The Essential Cy Twombly," edited by Twombly's longtime collaborator Nicola Del Roscio, is the ultimate overview of his work, presenting the most important paintings and cycles of paintings, drawings, sculptures and photographs from Twombly's diverse oeuvre. The most accessible survey of his work to date, this volume includes essays by Laszlo Glozer, Thierry Greub, Kirk Varnedoe and Simon Schama.
Edwin Parker (Cy) Twombly (1928-2011) was born in Lexington, Virginia. He lived and worked in New York in the early 1950s (where he met Robert Rauschenberg, with whom he was to have a long personal and artistic relationship) and studied at the legendary Black Mountain College in North Carolina before traveling around North Africa, Spain and Italy and ultimately settling in Rome before the end of the decade, just as the art world was shifting its center of gravity to New York. Best known for his paintings and drawings, often executed on a massive scale across multiple canvases, Twombly also made sculptures and photographs.

It is a story like no other: an epic of endurance against destruction, of creativity in oppression, joy amidst grief, the affirmation of life against the steepest of odds. It spans the millennia and the continents - from India to Andalusia and from the bazaars of Cairo to the streets of Oxford. It takes you to unimagined places: to a Jewish kingdom in the mountains of southern Arabia; a Syrian synagogue glowing with radiant wall paintings; the palm groves of the Jewish dead in the Roman catacombs. And its voices ring loud and clear, from the severities and ecstasies of the Bible writers to the love poems of wine bibbers in a garden in Muslim Spain. Within these pages, the Talmud burns in the streets of Paris, massed gibbets hang over the streets of medieval London, a Majorcan illuminator redraws the world; candles are lit, chants are sung, mules are packed, ships loaded with spice and gems founder at sea. And a great story unfolds. Not - as often imagined - of a culture apart, but of a Jewish world immersed in and imprinted by the peoples among whom they have dwelled, from the Egyptians to the Greeks, from the Arabs to the Christians. Which makes the story of the Jews everyone's story, too.

A reissue of Simon Schama's landmark study of the Netherlands from 1780-1813, this is a tale of a once-powerful nation's desparate struggle to survive the treacheries and brutality of European war and politics. Between 1780 and 1813 the Dutch Republic - a country once rich enough to be called the cash till of Europe and powerful enough to make war with England - was stripped of its colonies, invaded by its enemies, driven to the edge of bankruptcy, and, finally, reduced to becoming an appendage of the French empire - an appendage not even the French seemed to value overmuch. Out of these events Simon Schama has constructed a gripping chronicle of revolution and privateering, constitutions and coups, in a tiny nation desperately struggling to stay afloat in a sea of geopolitics. Like his classics 'The Embarrassment of Riches' and 'Citizens', 'Patriots and Liberators' combines a mastery of historical sources with an unabashed delight in narrative. The result confirms Schama as a historian in the finest tradition - one whose study of the past reveals volumes about the present. This is one of our most revered historians' greatest works, and this new Perennial edition will reintroduce his genius to a new generation of readers.

Written by a team of eminent historians, these essays explore how ten twentieth-century intellectuals and social reformers sought to adapt such familiar Victorian values as civilisation', domesticity', conscience' and improvement' to modern conditions of democracy, feminism and mass culture. Covering such figures as J.M. Keynes, E.M. Forster and Lord Reith of the BBC, these interdisciplinary studies scrutinize the children of the Victorians at a time when their private assumptions and public positions were under increasing strain in a rapidly changing world.
After the Victorians is written in honour of the late Professor John Clive of Harvard, and uses, as he did, the method of biography to connnect the public and private lives of the generations who came after the Victorians.

'Wordy is about the intoxication of writing; my sense of playful versatility; different voices for different matters: the polemical voice for political columns; the sharp-eyed descriptive take for profiles; poetic precision in grappling with the hard task of translating art into words; lyrical recall for memory pieces. And informing everything a rich sense of the human comedy and the ways it plays through historical time. It's also a reflection on writers who have been shamelessly gloried in verbal abundance; the performing tumble of language - those who have especially inspired me - Dickens and Melville; Joyce and Marquez.' Simon Schama Sir Simon Schama has been at the forefront of the arts, political commentary, social analysis and historical study for over forty years. As a teacher of Art History and an award-winning television presenter of iconic history-based programming, Simon is equally a prolific bestselling writer and award-winning columnist for many of the world's foremost publishers, broadsheet newspapers, periodicals and magazines. His commissioned subjects over the years have been numerous and wide ranging - from the music of Tom Waits, to the works of Sir Quentin Blake; the history of the colour blue, to discussing what skills an actor needs to create a unique performance of Falstaff. Schama's tastes are wide-ranging as they are eloquent, incisive, witty and thought provoking and have entertained and educated the readers of some of the world's most respected publications - the Times, the Guardian, the New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar and Rolling Stone magazine. Wordy is a celebration of one of the world's foremost writers. This collection of fifty essays chosen by the man himself stretches across four decades and is a treasure trove for all those who have a passion for the arts, politics, food and life.

'Wordy is about the intoxication of writing; my sense of playful versatility; different voices for different matters: the polemical voice for political columns; the sharp-eyed descriptive take for profiles; poetic precision in grappling with the hard task of translating art into words; lyrical recall for memory pieces. And informing everything a rich sense of the human comedy and the ways it plays through historical time. It's also a reflection on writers who have been shamelessly gloried in verbal abundance; the performing tumble of language - those who have especially inspired me - Dickens and Melville; Joyce and Marquez.' Simon Schama Sir Simon Schama has been at the forefront of the arts, political commentary, social analysis and historical study for over forty years. As a teacher of Art History and an award-winning television presenter of iconic history-based programming, Simon is equally a prolific bestselling writer and award-winning columnist for many of the world's foremost publishers, broadsheet newspapers, periodicals and magazines. His commissioned subjects over the years have been numerous and wide ranging - from the music of Tom Waits, to the works of Sir Quentin Blake; the history of the colour blue, to discussing what skills an actor needs to create a unique performance of Falstaff. Schama's tastes are wide-ranging as they are eloquent, incisive, witty and thought provoking and have entertained and educated the readers of some of the world's most respected publications - the Times, the Guardian, the New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar and Rolling Stone magazine. Wordy is a celebration of one of the world's foremost writers. This collection of fifty essays chosen by the man himself stretches across four decades and is a treasure trove for all those who have a passion for the arts, politics, food and life.

Simon Schama brings Britain to life through its portraits, as seen in the five-part BBC series The Face of Britain and the major National Portrait Gallery exhibition

Churchill and his painter locked in a struggle of stares and glares; Gainsborough watching his daughters run after a butterfly; a black Othello in the nineteenth century; the poet-artist Rossetti trying to capture on canvas what he couldn't possess in life; a surgeon-artist making studies of wounded faces brought in from the Battle of the Somme; a naked John Lennon five hours before his death.

In the age of the hasty glance and the selfie, Simon Schama has written a tour de force about the long exchange of looks from which British portraits have been made over the centuries: images of the modest and the mighty; of friends and lovers; heroes and working people. Each of them - the image-maker, the subject, and the rest of us who get to look at them - are brought unforgettably to life. Together they build into a collective picture of Britain, our past and our present, a look into the mirror of our identity at a moment when we are wondering just who we are.

Combining his two great passions, British history and art history, for the first time, Schama's extraordinary storytelling reveals the truth behind the nation's most famous portrayals of power, love, fame, the self, and the people. Mesmerising in its breadth and its panache, and beautifully illustrated, with more than 150 images from the National Portrait Gallery, The Face of Britain will change the way we see our past - and ourselves.

This is the book that made Simon Schama’s reputation when first published in 1987. A historical masterpiece, it is an epic account of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age of Rembrandt and van Diemen. In this brilliant work that moves far beyond the conventions of social or cultural history, Simon Schama investigates the astonishing case of a people’s self-invention. He shows how, in the 17th-century, a modest assortment of farming, fishing and shipping communities, without a shared language, religion or government, transformed themselves into a formidable world empire – the Dutch republic.

'Landscape & Memory' is a history book unlike any other. In a series of exhilarating journeys through space and time, it examines our relationship with the landscape around us – rivers, mountains, forests – the impact each of them has had on our culture and imaginations, and the way in which we, in turn, have shaped them to answer our needs. 'For although we are accustomed to separate nature and human perception into two realms,' writes Schama, 'they are, in fact, indivisible. Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock.'

Schama does not make his argument by any conventional historical method. Instead he builds it up by a series of almost poetic stories and impressions which cumulatively have the effect of a great novel. The forest primeval, the river of life, the sacred mount – at the end of 'Landscape & Memory' we understand where these ideas have come from, why they are so compelling, what they meant to our forebears, and how they still lie all around us if only we know how to look.

"Schama long ago established himself as one of the most learned, original and provocative historians in the English-speaking world… 'Landscape & Memory' offers not only a fine work of historical craft, but also something more like an ambitious work of literary art: a highly original study of the ways in which history not only shapes, but becomes inextricably embedded in, land and trees and water, and they in it … 'Landscape & Memory' has not only the range of a great nineteenth-century work of history, but also the disorientating power of a major work of art from our disorientated fin de siècle… Schama's ability to combine the personal with the philological, the scholarly with the artistic, makes his book fall outside normal categories… Unclassifiable, inimitable, sometimes irritating and often fascinating, 'Landscape & Memory' will inform and haunt, chasten and enrage, its readers. It is that rarest of commodities in our cultural marketplace, a work of genuine originality."
ANTHONY GRAFTON, 'New Republic'

"Schama does more than re-write our relation to nature; he wants us to re-think our relation to myth… Schama's originality lies in the brilliant persistence with which he follows a nature myth through the aeons of time… This is a 'tour de force' of vivid historical writing… It is astoundingly learned, and yet learning is offered with verve, humour and an unflagging sense of delight."
MICHAEL IGNATIEFF, 'Independent on Sunday'

"Schama's intensely visual prose is the product of a historical imagination which is not restrained by conventional academic inhibitions… It is his ability (and willingness) to write this sort of narrative prose – vivid, elaborate, unashamedly colourful… that makes Simon Schama the obvious modern successor to Macaulay … Schama is a masterly narrator who spins and embroiders his yarns with unflagging zest. The book abounds in virtuoso passages, some of them reminiscent of Rabelais or Sterne."
KEITH THOMAS, 'New York Review of Books'

"Simon Schama is a giant, a great thinking-machine and a golden lyricist as well. He is tremendously stimulating company, setting the reader off on journeys he never would have imagined for himself… He wants to take us beyond geology and vegetation into myth and memory, to unravel the ancient connections which bring mountain, forest and river into our soul."
BRIAN MASTERS, 'Mail on Sunday'

If you were black in America at the start of the Revolutionary War, which side would you want to win?

When the last British governor of Virginia declared that any rebel-owned slave who escaped and served the king would be emancipated, tens of thousands of slaves fled from farms, plantations, and cities to try to reach the British camp. A military strategy originally designed to break the plantations of the American South had unleashed one of the great exoduses in U.S. history. With powerfully vivid storytelling, Schama details the odyssey of the escaped blacks through the fires of war and the terror of potential recapture, shedding light on an extraordinary, little-known chapter in the dark saga of American slavery.

Like his The Embarrassment of Riches and the bestselling Citizens, Simon Schama's latest book is both history and literature of immense stylishness and ambition. But Dead Certainties goes beyond these more conventional histories to address the deeper enigmas that confront a student of the past. In order to do so, Schama reconstructs -- and at times reinvents -- two ambiguous deaths: the first, that of General James Wolfe at the battle of Quebec in 1759; the second, in 1849, that of George Parkman, an eccentric Boston brahmin whose murder by an impecunious Harvard professor in 1849 was a grisly reproach to the moral sanctity of his society. Out of these stories -- with all of their bizarre coincidences and contradictions -- Schama creates a dazzling and supremely vital work of historical imagination.

Schama explores the mysterious contradictions of the Dutch nation that invented itself from the ground up, attained an unprecedented level of affluence, and lived in constant dread of being corrupted by happiness. Drawing on a vast array of period documents and sumptuously reproduced art, Schama re-creates in precise detail a nation's mental state. He tells of bloody uprisings and beached whales, of the cult of hygiene and the plague of tobacco, of thrifty housewives and profligate tulip-speculators. He tells us how the Dutch celebrated themselves and how they were slandered by their enemies.



"History on the grand scale...An ambitious portrait of one of the most remarkable episodes in modern history."--New York Times


"Wonderfully inclusive; with wit and intense curiosity he teases out meaning from every aspect of Dutch seventeenth-century life."--Robert Hughes

Instead of the dying Old Regime, Schama presents an ebullient country, vital and inventive, infatuated with novelty and technology--a strikingly fresh view of Louis XVI's France. A New York Times bestseller in hardcover. 200 illustrations.

* 'Great art has dreadful manners...' Simon Schama observes at the start of his epic exploration of the power, and whole point, of art. 'The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are polite things, visions that soothe, charm and beguile, but actually they are thugs. Merciless and wily, the greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your sense of reality...' * With the same disarming force, Power of Art jolts us far from the comfort zone of the hushed art gallery, as Schama closes in on intense make-or-break turning points in the lives of eight great artists who, under extreme stress, created something unprecedented, altering the course of art for ever. * The embattled heroes - Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso and Rothko - faced crisis with steadfast defiance. The masterpieces they created challenged convention, shattered complacency, shifted awareness and changed the way we look at the world. With powerfully vivid story-telling, Schama explores the dynamic personalities of the artists and the spirit of the times they lived through, capturing the flamboyant theatre of bourgeois life in Amsterdam, the passion and paranoia of Revolutionary Paris, and the carnage and pathos of civil-war Spain. * Most compelling of all, Power of Art traces the extraordinary evolution of eight world-class works of art. Created in a bolt of illumination, such works 'tell us something about how the world is, how it is to be inside our skins, that no more prosaic source of wisdom can deliver. And when they do that they answer, irrefutably and majestically, the nagging question of every reluctant art-conscript... "OK, OK, but what's art really for?"'

A passionate history of Judaism; a world unfolding across many continents and five centuries by one of our greatest and internationally bestselling historians. Belonging is a magnificent cultural history abundantly alive with energy, character and colour. From the Jews' expulsion from Spain in 1492 it tells the stories not just of rabbis and philosophers but of a poetess in the ghetto of Venice; a boxer in Georgian England; a general in Ming China; an opera composer in nineteenth-century Germany. The story unfolds in Kerala and Mantua, the starlit hills of Galilee, the rivers of Colombia, the kitchens of Istanbul, the taverns of Ukraine and the mining camps of California. It sails in caravels, rides the stage coaches and the railways; trudges the dawn streets of London, hobbles along with the remnant of Napoleon's ruined army. The Jewish story is a history that is about, and for, all of us. And in our own time of anxious arrivals and enforced departures, the Jews' search for a home is more startlingly resonant than ever. 'A magnificent achievement...' Jonathan Freedland, Guardian 'An extraordinary cultural journey, filled with astonishingly colourful and outrageous characters ... Schama delivers a superb and thrilling ride, both inspirational and tragic' Simon Sebag Montefiore, Mail on Sunday

Introduction by Simon Schama