Quotes by : Simon Schama

Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a....

Somehow, the words don't have any vitality, any life to them, unless I can feel it marking on a paper.....

Sculptures created from found materials like ice and thorns, driftwood, and even bleached kangaroo bones....

History gives you insight of the same quality of truth as poetry or philosophy or a novel.

The history of the Jews has been written overwhelmingly by scholars of texts - understandably given the....

The Elephantine papyri - written as some of the books of the Bible are being written - is true social....

I actually think that history has fed off the restlessness of cyber space, of kind of the frantic, segmented....

In Mesopotamia or Egypt, for example, the monarch had a god-like religious status. But this is not the....

As a schoolboy, poetry seemed defined by preciousness. It was all very rarefied.

The challenge for a nonfiction writer is to achieve a poetic precision using the documents of truth but....

The difficulty with poetry is that it doesn't have the life that Shakespeare or Jane Austen have beyond....