` History clings tight but it also kicks loose, ` writes Simon Schama at the outset of this, the first book in his three-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, its counter-point, seen from the twenty-first, must be alteration.` Change
- sometimes gentle & subtle, sometimes shocking & violent
- is the dynamic of Schama`s unapologetically personal & grippingly written history, especially the changes that wash over custom & habit, transforming our loyalties. At the heart of this history lie questions of compelling importance for Britain`s future as well as its past: what makes or breaks a nation? To whom do we give our allegiance & why? & where do the boundaries of our community lie
- in our hearth & 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 & excitingly fresh. The great & the wicked are here
- Becket & Thomas Cromwell, Robert the Bruce & 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. They are all caught on the rich & teeming canvas on which Schama paints his brilliant portrait of the life of the British 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.`