24 quotes found
Historian · English
English historian
“As a schoolboy, poetry seemed defined by preciousness. It was all very rarefied.”
“History gives you insight of the same quality of truth as poetry or philosophy or a novel.”
“Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed...”
“I actually think that history has fed off the restlessness of cyber space, of kind of the frantic, segmented nature of the way we lead our lives. People want to be connected.”
“The history of the Jews has been written overwhelmingly by scholars of texts - understandably given the formative nature of the Bible and the Talmud. Seeing Jewish history through artifacts, archit...”
“In Mesopotamia or Egypt, for example, the monarch had a god-like religious status. But this is not the case in Judaism. So that notion that religion can go on, when all the markers of power and tra...”
“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.”
“Sculptures created from found materials like ice and thorns, driftwood, and even bleached kangaroo bones all presuppose that artistic design will yield to the cycles of time and climate, whether ov...”
“Somehow, the words don't have any vitality, any life to them, unless I can feel it marking on a paper. That's how I start. Once I'm off, then I switch to the laptop. I think it would all just be pr...”
“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 costume drama out of it. There's no place for it to go except trap...”
“The Elephantine papyri - written as some of the books of the Bible are being written - is true social and legal documentation, and to historians overwhelmingly powerful and moving, even when ostens...”
“Part of me wants to say with Wordsworth: 'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.' But if you ask me was it worth it, I don't think it was. If you pin me against a wall and ask: 'Schama, do you thin...”
“I remember we thought that, whatever else happened in the remainder of the century, two traditional issues were going to go away. One was the nation, which was simply going to dissolve because the ...”
“When I started writing [Citizens], I thought the revolution of 1789 then goes on the skids and turns into the Terror of 1793. But I became more and more alarmed by what happened in 1789, and more a...”
“Landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from the strata of memory as layers of rocks... The book [Landscape and Memory] is a celebration of the improbable resilience both...”
“If there's one four-letter word that runs through my television history, oddly it is Rome. Over time, I came to realise that Rome doesn't just come and go in England's history; instead, we have had...”
“Right through British history we see this constant pull between piety and pragmatism, between deference to the monarch as a godlike figure, and a requirement that he runs the business of Albion wit...”
“To be fully MAGA is still to live, 24/7, within a parallel universe, hermetically closed off from the inconvenient intrusion of fact, blissfully captive to a fantastic theology.”
“Inheriting the acronym from the father figure of radio populism, Rush Limbaugh, Trump habitually dismisses his Republican adversaries as Rinos (Republicans In Name Only). But the gravamen of the ch...”
“Repeatedly, this reviewer was struck by the interest of Schama's comparisons and the manner in which his vignettes illuminate and advance his themes. His understanding of the human creation of plac...”
