Simon Schama Livres

This dazzling, unconventional biography shows us why, more than three centuries after his death, Rembrandt continues to exert such a hold on our imagination. Deeply familiar to us through his enigmatic self-portraits, few facts are known about the Leiden miller's son who tasted brief fame before facing financial ruin (he was even forced to sell his beloved wife Saskia's grave). The true biography of Rembrandt, as Simon Schama demonstrates, is to be discovered in his pictures. Interweaving of seventeenth-century Holland, Schama allows us to see Rembrandt in a completely fresh and original way.

The words that failed were words of hope. But they did not fail at all times and everywhere. These gripping pages teem with words of defiance and optimism, sounds and images of tenacious life and adventurous modernism, music and drama, business and philosophy, poetry and politics.

Simon Schama sets out to discover which story, if any story, is the story of the many stories of the disappearance of Doctor George Parkman, the perfect Yankee. Plus: William Boyd, Geoffrey Wolff, Louise Erdrich, Don DeLillo, Amitav Ghosh, and Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (part two).

Simon Schama, the author of "The Embarrassment of Riches" and "Citizens", sets out to tell the history of two certainties, of two deaths. In discussing the "speculations" surrounding them, he finds himself involved in a history he cannot classify - the unpredictable history of stories. On 13 September 1759, General James Wolfe, having led the British troops up the St Lawrence to victory in the Battle of Quebec, died on the Heights of Abraham. Schama examines this death, and how Wolfe was made to die again - through the spectacular painting by Benjamin West, and through the writings of the 19th-century historian Francis Parkman. Schama's second death concerns Parkman's uncle, George Parkman of Harvard Medical College, who disappeared in 1849 in mysterious circumstances and who was rumoured to have been murdered by a colleague. Through these incidents, Schama sheds light on the writing of history, the history of history, and the relationship of "story" to "history".

An extraordinary book that explores how the earth itself has shaped the Western imagination and how, as a result, our interaction with the environment is far richer and more complex than today's doomsayers would have us believe.

The great 17th-century Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn created numerous self-portraits throughout his life, making his distinctive visage a familiar sight in galleries across Europe and North America. Yet, he remains an enigma. Known for his difficult personality and risk-taking in both life and art, Rembrandt's aspirations for a grand Amsterdam lifestyle ultimately led to his bankruptcy and death in relative poverty. His personal belongings and cherished collection were sold off, leaving historians with limited records to construct his biography. In this work, Simon Schama, a leading historian dedicated to Dutch history, vividly brings to life the painter of masterpieces like The Night Watch. Returning to the vibrant Dutch world he previously explored, Schama masterfully intertwines Rembrandt's life with the rich tapestry of 17th-century Low Countries' politics and commerce, navigating the complexities of faith and power struggles. The narrative contrasts Rembrandt's journey with that of his contemporary, Peter Paul Rubens, whose successful career highlights Rembrandt's troubled relationship with fame. This beautifully illustrated book, printed on high-gloss paper, offers a captivating narrative that engages readers with its blend of history, emotion, and artistry.

For Rembrandt, as for Shakespeare, all the world was indeed a stage, and he knew in exhaustive detail the tactics of its performance: the strutting and mincing, the wardrobe and face-paint, the full repertoire and gesture and gimace, the flutter of hands and the roll of the eyes, the belly-laugh and the half-stifled sob. He knew what it looked like to seduce, to intimidate, to wheedle and to console; to strike a pose or preach a sermon, to shake a fist or uncover a breast; and how to sin and how to atone. No artist had ever been so fascinated by the fashioning of personae, beginning with his own. No painter ever looked with such unsparing intelligence or such bottomless compassion at our entrances and our exits and the whole rowdy show in between.

This work takes us from the mid-1770s when the country was intoxicated by a great surge of political energy through to the massive advances of technology and industrialisation during the Victoria era, and the burgeoning of the British Empire

A wide-ranging collection of essays written by the award-winning writer and historian over his forty-year career, chosen by the man himself.

'History clings tight but it also kicks loose,' writes Simon Schama at the outset of At the Edge of the World?, the first book in his three-volume journey into Britain's past. And change - sometimes gentle and subtle, sometimes shocking and violent - is the dynamic of Schama's unapologetically personal and grippingly written history.

Simon Schama’s dramatic, broad-ranging, and immensely readable epic history of Britain reaches its triumphant conclusion in this third and final volume, which stretches from the American Revolution to the present.

This text explores the enigma of 17th-century Holland, a nation that attained an unprecedented level of affluence, yet lived in constant dread of being corrupted by prosperity

The British Wars is a compelling chronicle of the changes that transformed every strand and strata of British life, faith and thought from 1603 to 1776. It explores the forces that tore Britain apart during two centuries of dynamic change

Pre-eminent author and art historian Simon Schama has written widely on art for many years to great acclaim.

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 âe" 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 âe" as often imagined âe" 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 everyoneâe(tm)s story, too.

In response to a declaration by the last royal 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 camp. This mass movement lasted as long as the war did, and a military strategy originally designed to break the plantations of the American South had unleashed one of the great exoduses in American history. Schama details the odyssey of the escaped blacks through the fires of war and the terror of potential recapture at the war's end, into inhospitable Nova Scotia, where thousands who had served the Crown were betrayed and, in a little-known hegira of the slave epic, sent across the broad, stormy ocean to Sierra Leone.--From publisher description.̓

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

A narrative history of the French Revolution by the author of "Patriots and Liberators" and "The Embarrassment of Riches". Drawing on resources of social and cultural history, Schama focuses on the transformation of the initial euphoric vision of the Revolution into the reality of the Terror.

Set during the French Revolution, the two cities in question are Paris and London and the tale is one of the tragedies that take place therein.

Passionate, provocative, entertaining and informative, Scribble, Scribble, Scribble ranges far and wide: from cookery and family to Barack Obama, from preaching and Shakespeare to Victorian sages, from Charlotte Rampling and Hurricane Katrina to 'The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of The Osbournes'.

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.

Imagine what a dictionary might look like about thirty years hence, when all of the world's problems are solved and our current dictionaries are a distant memory. Dave Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss have lined up an incredible array of writers to bring you that futuristic dictionary and a vision of the world as it might be. Think of it as a dictionary of language for describing what the future could look like a dictionary that is both useful and romantic, hopeful and necessary, pragmatic and idealistic, and frequently funny. This is science fiction but with a difference.

In November 2008 the United States of America will elect a new president. But the imminent collapse of 20 years of Republican conservatism means the country is already conducting an intense self-examination about the trajectory of its history. This book provides a timely & masterful history of this, the world's most controversial superpower. Origin.

Cities and countries gripped by panic and death, desperate for vaccines yet fearful of inoculation—this mirrors the global experience during Covid-19. Simon Schama illustrates that history has seen similar crises before. Through compelling narratives set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he recounts the devastation of smallpox in London, cholera in Paris, and plague in India. The stories unfold in hospitals, prisons, palaces, and slums, featuring unforgettable characters: a philosopher-playwright suffering from smallpox in a chateau, a doctor making house calls in Halifax, and a woman doctor in India navigating her inoculator-carriage through devastated streets. The narrative also takes us into laboratories where life-saving breakthroughs occur in Paris, Hong Kong, and Mumbai. Central to this tale is Waldemar Haffkine, a Jewish student turned microbiologist at the Pasteur Institute, celebrated in England as 'the saviour of mankind' for vaccinating millions against cholera and bubonic plague in British India, despite facing rejection from the medical establishment. Creator of the first mass vaccine production line in Mumbai, he ultimately suffers a tragic injustice. This work traverses borders between east and west, rich and poor, politics and science, emphasizing the interconnectedness of humanity and nature. Schama asserts that as we confront modern challenges, "there are no foreigners, only familiars."

In May 2005 Penguin will publish 70 unique titles to celebrate the company's 70th birthday. The titles in the Pocket Penguins series are emblematic of the renowned breadth of quality of the Penguin list and will hark back to Penguin founder Allen Lane's vision of good books for all'. whose books and TV series have enthralled huge audiences through their gripping storytelling. Citizens, his award-winning account of the French Revolution, has continued to be one of Penguin's most popular history titles since it was first published in 1989. This extract takes us into the heart of the revolution's ferment as the angry crowd storm the Bastille

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 camp. This mass movement lasted as long as the war did, and a military strategy originally designed to break the plantations of the American South had unleashed one of the great exoduses in American history.With powerfully vivid storytelling, Schama details the odyssey of the escaped blacks through the fires of war and the terror of potential recapture at the war's end, into inhospitable Nova Scotia, where thousands who had served the Crown were betrayed and, in a little-known hegira of the slave epic, sent across the broad, stormy ocean to Sierra Leone.

Simon Schama, známý popularizátor umění, nás zve na procházku po Národní portrétní galerii v Londýně a zároveň po dějinách Velké Británie. Pohlédneme do tváře řady významných osobností – monarchů, šlechticů, umělců a dalších, kteří ve tváři ostrovního impéria zanechali výrazný otisk. Schama jako skvělý vypravěč podniká výpravy do hloubi dějin, koření je barvitými příběhy, každá kapitola je dobrodružnou cestou do vzdálenější i nedávné historie; najdeme v nich odpovědi na otázky, proč se portréty malují a jaký byl jejich význam ať už z uměleckého nebo třeba i z politického hlediska. Kniha je také pobídkou zamyslet se nad osobnostmi, které většinou známe z učebnic, nad jejich osudy, touhami a nad tím, čím se zapsaly do dějin.

Qual è il misterioso fascino della grande arte sull'essere umano, indipendentemente dalla sua estrazione sociale e culturale? Perché un capolavoro riesce a turbare la nostra tranquillità e visione del mondo? Simon Schama, storico e critico d'arte, esplora l'atto della creazione artistica attraverso i ritratti di otto maestri della pittura e della scultura. Ogni artista selezionato rappresenta un momento cruciale nella sua produzione, caratterizzato da una "spasimo acuto" e da una tensione creativa. Caravaggio, ad esempio, esprime il suo senso di colpa nell'opera "Decollazione del Battista", mentre Bernini afferma il suo ruolo con "L'estasi di Santa Teresa". Rembrandt affronta la committenza nel "Giuramento dei Batavi", e artisti come David, Turner e Picasso utilizzano la pittura come strumento di impegno civile. Van Gogh e Rothko, infine, incarnano una creatività come missione suprema. Questi "drammi della creazione" coincidono con momenti di evoluzione personale, in cui l'artista si confronta con progetti di grande portata, i cui risultati espressivi muteranno per sempre la storia dell'arte. L'artista emerge come un creatore posseduto dalla scintilla divina, spesso osteggiato, ma trionfante grazie al suo genio. L'arte non solo racconta le storie di otto capolavori e personalità straordinarie, ma risponde anche all'interrogativo sul suo valore nella nostra vita.