Dimensions
153 x 234 x 27mm
The first volume in Schama's unapologetically personal, grippingly written history of Britain.
"History clings tight but it also kicks loose" writes Simon Schama at the outset of this, his first volume of his epic two volume journey into Britain's past "Disruption as much as persistence is its proper subject. So although the great theme of British history seen from the twentieth century is endurance, it's counterpoint seen from the twenty-first must be alteration."
Change - sometimes gentle and subtle, sometimes shocking and violent - is the dynamic of Schama's unapologetically personal, grippingly written history, especially the changes that wash over custom and habit, transforming our loyalties.
At the heart of his history lies a question of compelling importance for our future as well as our past: what makes or breaks a nation: to whom we give our allegiance and why? And where do the boundaries of our community lie - in our hearth and home, our village or city, tribe or faith? What is Britain, one country or many, one culture or several? Has British history unfolded "at the edge of the world" or right at the heart of it?
All these themes are delivered to the reader in the stories which Schama loves to tell, and in a form that is at once traditional and excitingly fresh. The great and wicked are all here - Becket and Thomas Cromwell, Robert the Bruce and Ann Boleyn, but so are countless more ordinary lives - an Irish monk waiting for the plague to kill him in his cell at Kilkenny; a small boy running through the streets of London to catch a glimpse of Elizabeth I.
They are all caught on the rich and teeming canvas on which Schama paints his brilliant portrait of the life of our people "for in the end, history, especially British history with its succession of thrilling illuminations, should be, as all her most accomplished narrators have promised, not just instruction but pleasure."
