Simon Schama

In the second of two volumes of this magnificently illustrated cultural history—the tie-in to the PBS and BBC series The Story of the Jews—Simon Schama details the story of the Jewish people, spanning from their expulsion from Spain during the Inquisition across six hundred years to the present day.

It is a story like no other: an epic of endurance against destruction, of creativity in the face of oppression, joy amidst grief,

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Simon Schama's latest book fuses history and art to create a tour de force of narrative sweep and illuminating insight. Using images from works--paintings, photographs, lithographs, etchings, sketches--found in London's National Portrait Gallery, The Face of Britain weaves together an account of their composition, framed by their particular moment of creation, and in the process unveils a collective portrait of a nation and its history. "Portraits."...

Collects more than thirty previously published essays on a diverse range of topics, including food habits, art, politics, history, and travel.

Rough Crossings turns on a single huge question: if you were black in America at the start of the Revolutionary War, whom would you want to win? In response to a declaration by the last governor of Virginia that any rebel-owned slave who escaped and served the King would be emancipated, tens of thousands of slaves -- Americans who clung to the sentimental notion of British freedom -- escaped from farms, plantations and cities to try to reach the British...

From one of the truly preeminent historians of our time, this is a landmark book chronicling the French Revolution. Simon Schama deftly refutes the contemporary notion that the French Revolution represented an uprising of the oppressed poor against a decadent aristocracy and corrupt court. He argues instead that the revolution was born of a rift among the elite over the speed of progress toward modernity and science, social and economic change.

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Simon Schama's 15-episode (over 3 series) history of Great Britain from 3100 B.C. through the 20th century.

In the early days of the French Revolution, a young Englishman determines to do the utmost to save the husband of the woman he loves from the guillotine. Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities portrays a world on fire, split between Paris and London during the brutal and bloody events of the French Revolution. After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille the aging Dr Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England....