Simon Schama

His specialty is finding interesting midlevel characters from the buried mounds of history and telling their stories. --David Brooks, Mirror on America, The New York Times, May 22, 2009, review of The American Future: A History, by Simon Schama


Recommended reading:
by Simon Schama at Reading Rat


Criticism (articles, essays, reviews):

Schama ascribes this perfectionism to a powerful sense of his own inadequacy, which I guessed at when reading his account of John Stuart Mill in the latest volume of A History of Britain. Like Schama, Mill had a father who pushed his gifted son "mercilessly" and Schama describes him as "cowed by the burden of his assigned mission to Know Everything that Mattered". --Cassandra Jardine, History man, The Telegraph, October 18, 2002