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The Vintage Podcast: Writing the story of the Jews

The Story of the Jews 1492–1900

Belonging

A passionate history of Judaism; a world unfolding across many continents and five centuries by one of our greatest and internationally bestselling historians. 
 
Belonging is a magnificent cultural history abundantly alive with energy, character and colour. From the Jews’ expulsion from Spain in 1492 it tells the stories not just of rabbis and philosophers but of a poetess in the ghetto of Venice; a boxer in Georgian England; a general in Ming China; an opera composer in nineteenth-century Germany. The story unfolds in Kerala and Mantua, the starlit hills of Galilee, the rivers of Colombia, the kitchens of Istanbul, the taverns of Ukraine and the mining camps of California. It sails in caravels, rides the stage coaches and the railways; trudges the dawn streets of London, hobbles along with the remnant of Napoleon’s ruined army. 
 
The Jewish story is a history that is about, and for, all of us. And in our own time of anxious arrivals and enforced departures, the Jews’ search for a home is more startlingly resonant than ever. 
 
 ‘A magnificent achievement…’ Jonathan Freedland, Guardian 
 
 ‘An extraordinary cultural journey, filled with astonishingly colourful and outrageous characters … Schama delivers a superb and thrilling ride, both inspirational and tragic’ Simon Sebag Montefiore, Mail on Sunday

A passionate history of a world unfolding across many continents and five centuries by one of our greatest and internationally bestselling historians.

A magnificent achievement… [a] parade of bustlingly vital characters from across the globe ... all painted in luminous colour… By offering such a throbbing cavalcade of characters, Schama is defying several key assumptions, even stereotypes, about Jewish history and Jews themselves… Above all, while much Jewish history can read like a sorrowful trudge through disaster, plague and pogrom, Schama’s book teems with life rather than death

Magisterial ... the product of a world-class historian at the peak of his creative powers … rich, ornate, intensely evocative and sensory. With astonishing range and extraordinary synthesising powers, Schama captures the drama of Jewish history.

A rich melody that soars above the ground bass of prejudice and persecution … Schama has made himself the leading virtuoso of our time. This second volume of this trilogy is an affirmation of faith in the grand narrative … Its familiar and familial tone proclaims the author’s unapologetic mission to play his part in the story of the Jews by bringing their history alive… [A] glittering gemstone of a book

So beautifully written it regularly takes your breath away, it is a book far greater than the sum of its parts. Daunted by its colossal size, I started reading with some trepidation; I finished filled with wonder and delight.

An extraordinary cultural journey, filled with astonishingly colourful and outrageous characters … Schama delivers a superb and thrilling ride, both inspirational and tragic.

Magisterial… a wonderfully rich narrative … The third and final volume won’t be easy reading. But at least in the company of Schama – one of the finest writers and thinkers of his generation – we’re guaranteed a guide both insightful and eloquent

Rich, complex and fascinating … Schama maintains the attention with the vividness of his writing and his talent for unearthing gripping figures full of human contradictions. And through this dazzling immersion in the preoccupations of the period that the bigger picture slowly emerges … Profoundly illuminating

Simon Schama is an international treasure ... By painterly touches, he manages to convey colour, texture, shape, context, light and shadow, as well as to stimulate the senses ... He is imaginative, epigrammatic and fearless ... an effervescent cicerone who instructs and entertains in like measure.

Immensely erudite and compulsively readable … The importance of Schama’s book is that it forces the reader to think about how the long and shameful legacy of Christian hatred for Jews is reworked in “enlightened” society… Deeply engaging

Schama is a talented storyteller with a dramatist’s eye for character … Schama leavens his tale with wit and charm, while also displaying remarkable breadth of research and erudition, ranging fluently from Sephardic merchant princes in the Mediterranean to fevered kabbalistic sects in Galilee

The second volume of Simon Schama’s story of the Jews…continues with a cast of characters so extraordinary that some seem hardly more believable than the Sabbath-keeping Sambatyon river… Schama, as both a historian and a Jew, closes his wonderful book the only way he could: with love shot through with melancholy and foreboding

Schama writes history through personalities, a technique that makes the second of his vast-ranging history of his people as gripping as the first… All these stories offer pathways backwards and forwards in time, and make an unforgettable tale of mixed fortunes

A revelation. It is an engaging and electrifying read by a skilled literary craftsman, cultural historian and tour guide … Schama enchants his readers by introducing colorful characters worthy of a Charles Dickens novel ... [it] dazzles with the art and alchemy of an adventure novel

Schama writes with power and energy, and his patchwork of individual tales crosses the world.

Extraordinary… From Britain to France, from America to the dark forests of central and eastern Europe, Schama’s scalpel-like wit and painterly descriptions provide a bravura panorama of the Jewish story

It’s a riveting read, bursting with anecdote, colour and wit. Schama uses individual stories to highlight horror and suffering, but also to illustrate bravery, achievement and hope

Few historians write with the energy of Simon Schama. His second volume on the history of the Jews shows that Schama has lost none of his vigour

Simon Schama takes the reader through a grand sweep of Jewish history, but he makes it so personal you begin to feel you know the men and women whose lives shine out from the pages, and their foibles, and you get a sense of the fragility of their lives and their determination to survive. It's a brilliant piece of work

Julia Neuberger, Senior Rabbi, West London Synagogue

Schama's speciality is to take sometimes little-known historical figures and bring them dramatically to life. We are presented with a glittering cast of Jews from every century since the 15th ... Belonging shows Jews as prize-fighters and charlatans, theatre managers and physicians, writers, actors, painters, farmers and musicians. They are men and women of every sort, who leap off the pages as they struggle with what Schama has defined as the abiding challenge of Jewish life in the diaspora

Simon Schama’s epic tale of the Jewish people is full of rich, colourful stories that span centuries and continents and include massacres, miracles, discrimination and tolerance… Passionate

In the hands of a master colourist, this is history as a portrait gallery.

It is an engaging and electrifying read by a skilled literary craftsman, cultural historian and tour guide.

Schama presents his material with the wit and panache of a novelist. The reader is treated to a dazzling parade of humanity in all its glory and shame. Every page sparkles with rich material and the range of learning is breathtaking. The story of Jewish survival – and sometimes even flourishing – against all the odds is utterly riveting.

Simon Schama is the perfect companion for a time-travelling journey through Jewish history… A beguiling narrator.

These accounts make such fascinating reading that, through Schama’s extraordinary gift for storytelling, his book was difficult to put down.

Simon Schama is University Professor of Art History and History at Columbia University. His award-winning books, translated into fifteen languages, include Citizens, Landscape and Memory, Rembrandt's Eyes, A History of Britain, The Power of Art, Rough Crossings, The American Future, The Face of Britain and The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words (1000 BCE - 1492). 
 
His art columns for the New Yorker won the National Magazine Award for criticism and his journalism has appeared regularly in the Guardian and the Financial Times where he is Contributing Editor. He has written and presented more than fifty films for the BBC on subjects as diverse as Tolstoy, American politics, and The Story of the Jews and is co-presenter of a new landmark series on the history of world art, Civilisations.

The Nation through Its Portraits

The Face of Britain

The Stories Behind the Nation’s Portraits

Churchill and his painter locked in a struggle of stares and glares; Gainsborough watching his daughters run after a butterfly; a naked John Lennon five hours before his death. 
 
Simon Schama has written a tour de force about British portraits over the centuries in which the image-maker, the subject and everyone else looking on are brought unforgettably to life. Mesmerising in its extraordinary storytelling, and beautifully illustrated, The Face of Britain will change the way we see our past - and ourselves.

Simon Schama brings Britain to life through its portraits, as seen in the five-part BBC series The Face of Britain and the major National Portrait Gallery exhibition 
 
Churchill and his painter locked in a struggle of stares and glares; Gainsborough watching his daughters run after a butterfly; a black Othello in the nineteenth century; the poet-artist Rossetti trying to capture on canvas what he couldn't possess in life; a surgeon-artist making studies of wounded faces brought in from the Battle of the Somme; a naked John Lennon five hours before his death. 
 
In the age of the hasty glance and the selfie, Simon Schama has written a tour de force about the long exchange of looks from which British portraits have been made over the centuries: images of the modest and the mighty; of friends and lovers; heroes and working people. Each of them - the image-maker, the subject, and the rest of us who get to look at them - are brought unforgettably to life. Together they build into a collective picture of Britain, our past and our present, a look into the mirror of our identity at a moment when we are wondering just who we are. 
 
Combining his two great passions, British history and art history, for the first time, Schama's extraordinary storytelling reveals the truth behind the nation's most famous portrayals of power, love, fame, the self, and the people. Mesmerising in its breadth and its panache, and beautifully illustrated, with more than 150 images from the National Portrait Gallery, The Face of Britain will change the way we see our past - and ourselves.

Schama's greatest gift is a sure eye for an extraordinary story...This isn't what you get from conventional historians or conventional art writers, more's the pity...Schama has written books which will still be bought and talked about a century from now and he hasn't lost an ounce of zest or intelligence. Damn him...

He knows the history, the biography, and the art history...he made me look and learn. He is a great storyteller and we learn something new on every page.

All of these lives rendered with an acuity of detail that could rival the best of portraitists ... describing Lawrence's portrait of Wilberforce, Schama calls the painting a work of "transforming empathy". That phrase could be true of his storytelling throughout this book.

Simon Schama's richly illustrated history of Britain in portraits is a work of dazzling panache ... a book to devour.

He has animated our portraits superlatively. One of our most in-demand public intellectuals has deftly ventriloquised his talking heads.

Wonderfully compelling ... what this book, full of unhackneyed paintings and unfamiliar stories, shows is that when Schama is at his best he can see straight through people.

Rich in its variety of subjects ... poignantly memorable

Some of the best writing on British portraiture I have read.

He is both an inspired communicator of detail and context, an excitable and exciting critic and a sleeve-tugging gossip. The idea of portraiture is a perfect vehicle for his detailed imagination...the subjects of the portraits become uncannily alive.

Viewers of his TV shows know what a passionate presenter of his subject - art history - Simon Schama is. He button-holes your eye on his inward voyage of imagination. He does it as compulsively on the page as on screen ... I welcome back in this book history as people - people whose characters can be read in their fascinating faces.

Inspiring ... Schama tells it with panache, weaving facts and anecdotes into a vivid history.

Schama has a masterly ability to conjure up character and vivify conflict

Financial Times on 'A History of Britain'

With Schama you look at a picture and see it as you hadn't before

Splendid, spirited, immensely enjoyable and wide-ranging

Financial Times on 'The Story of the Jews'

Shows Schama at his best . . . as full of memorable incident as a Bellow novel and wittier than a Woody Allen movie

Schama writes with grace and wit, and his enthusiasms are contagious

Anita Brookner on 'The Embarrassment of Riches'

Splendid... seething with ideas. Schama brings great intimacy and authority to proceedings

Simon Schama is University Professor of Art History and History at Columbia University and the prize-winning author of seventeen books, including The Embarrassment of Riches, Citizens, Landscape and Memory, Rembrandt's Eyes, the History of Britain trilogy and The Story of the Jews. He is a contributing editor of the Financial Times and his award-winning television work as writer and presenter for the BBC includes the fifteen-part A History of Britain and the eight-part, Emmy-winning Power of Art.

Finding the Words (1000 BCE – 1492)

The Story of the Jews

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 – 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 – as often imagined – 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 everyone’s story, too.

'Unforgettable…a delicious cacophony of conversations and clamorous arguments echoing across history' 
Daily Telegraph 
 
The landmark history of a people, culture and a world.

Schama at his best, a labour of love, as full of memorable incident as a Bellow novel and wittier than a Woody Allen movie

Schama has written a proud and personal story of his people, one that will make a good starting point for those interested in one of history’s most fascinating and tragic tales

Inspiring… Schama tells it with panache, weaving facts and anecdotes into a vivid history

Unforgettable…a delicious cacophony of conversations and clamorous arguments echoing across history

A spirited, immensely enjoyable and wide-ranging account… [expresses] both the triumphs and the tragedies with irrepressible enthusiasm and his customary eloquence

Schama is an entertaining and eloquent guide through the triumphs and tragedies

Schama at his best – a labour of love, as full of memorable incident as a Bellow novel and wittier than a Woody Allen movie

A remarkably authoritative and engaging book

Few historians write with the energy of Simon Schama. His second volume on the history of the Jews shows that Schama has lost none of his vigour: the mixture of stories about people, ordinary but more extraordinary, witty asides, Schama family reminiscences, schmaltzy views of Jewish life in past times – all this is there

Simon Schama is University Professor of Art History and History at Columbia University. His award-winning books, translated into fifteen languages, include Citizens, Landscape and Memory, Rembrandt's Eyes, A History of Britain, The Power of Art, Rough Crossings, The American Future, The Face of Britain and The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words (1000 BCE - 1492). 
 
His art columns for the New Yorker won the National Magazine Award for criticism and his journalism has appeared regularly in the Guardian and the Financial Times where he is Contributing Editor. He has written and presented forty films for BBC2 on subjects as diverse as Tolstoy, American politics and John Donne.

Writing on Ice Cream, Obama, Churchill and My Mother

Scribble, Scribble, Scribble

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 treasure trove of Schama's writing with subjects ranging from cookery to Barack Obama.

The most stimulating and surprising writing here is on cooking and eating... Diverting personal history

Wilfully miscellaneous but addictively readable volume... He is clever, versatile and extremely likeable

This sparkling, effervescent collection bridges the gap between scholarly and popular writing... It is excellent holiday reading: dip into this between the sea and the bar and you will find a subtle and amusing companion

Entrancing... A bedside book of rich insights... Enjoy

His eloquence is on magnificent display in this new book: a delightful collection of journalistic essays... The length of his book, overflowing with purple prose (though very rarely at the cost of substance), demonstrates that, often, Schama does not know when to stop. But in this case, maybe that is not such a bad thing

It really is very good...witty, learned, informative and clarifying

A busy and eventful voyage round Schamaland.. a one-man babble of erudition and wild enthusiasms

Historian Simon Schama is man of broad interests, making this diverse collection of reviews, speeches and interviews well worth reading

Ranging from Scorsese to soufflé Schama is a damn marvel

Lively and provocative... This book is a delight

At the Edge of the World? 3000 BC-AD 1603

A History of Britain - Volume 1

Change - sometimes gentle and subtle, sometimes shocking and violent - is the dynamic of Simon Schama's unapologetically personal and grippingly written history of Britain, especially the changes that wash over custom and habit, transforming our loyalties. 
 
What makes or breaks a nation? To whom do 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? Has British history unfolded 'at the edge of the world' or right at the heart of it? 
 
Schama delivers these themes in a form that is at once traditional and excitingly fresh. The great and the wicked are here - Becket and Thomas Cromwell, Robert the Bruce and Anne 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. 
 
The first in a series, this volume paints a rich and vivid portrait of the life of the British people and their nation.

The first book in Simon Schama's acclaimed three-volume journey into Britain's past.

An exciting, intensely seductive presentation of history.

He remains a master storyteller, admirably and sceptically well read in current revisionist histories, and a wonderful guide to a new history of Britain.

A History of Britain, its text supplemented by wonderful illustrations, affords the rare joy of witnessing a scholar at the peak of his powers convincing the reader that he has a cracking good tale to tell and that he is loving every minute of the telling.

Simon Schama's A History of Britain is far more than the book of the TV series... The book is far richer and fuller, covering a huge span so economically that there is room for plenty of arresting detail... It is the sort of vivid history that keeps you awake.

Remarkably vivid pictures... A decade on, Schama's study remains a terrific read.

A bravura performance by the Lord Macaulay of our day.

Schama has a masterly ability to conjure up character and vivify conflict.

The British Wars 1603-1776

A History of Britain - Volume 2

Simon Schama explores the forces that tore Britain apart during two centuries of dynamic change - transforming outlooks, allegiances and boundaries. 
 
From the beginning of July 1637, battles raged on for 200 years - both at home and abroad, on sea and on land, up and down the length of burgeoning Britain, across Europe, America and India. Most would be wars of faith - waged on wide-ranging grounds of political or religious conviction. But as wars of religious passions gave way to campaigns for profit, the British people did come together in the imperial enterprise of 'Britannia Incorporated'. 
 
The British Wars is a story of revolution and reaction, inspiration and disenchantment, of progress and catastrophe, and Schama's evocative narrative brings it vividly to life.

The second book in Simon Schama's acclaimed three-volume journey into Britain's past.

Simon Schama's A History of Britain is far more than the book of the TV series... The book is far richer and fuller, covering a huge span so economically that there is room for plenty of arresting detail... It is the sort of vivid history that keeps you awake.

Simon Schama

Vintage Minis

‘Great art has dreadful manners… 
 
…The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are visions that soothe, charm and beguile, but actually they are thugs. Merciless and wily, the greatest paintings grab you in a headlock and proceed in short order to re-arrange your sense of reality.’ In inimitable style, our greatest historian and master storyteller Simon Schama makes an irresistible case for the power of art and its necessary place in our lives, examining art through the prism of the troubling life and works of Italian master painter, and murderer, Caravaggio. 
 
Selected from The Power of Art 
 
VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human 
 
Also in the Vintage Minis 'Great Ideas' series: 
Religion by Karen Armstrong 
Science by Ian McEwan

Simon Schama

Art

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