A History of Britain, Volume III: The Fate of the Empire 1776–2000

"I studied British history as a student and didn’t particularly enjoy it. When I came back from living in Australia, I decided I wanted to learn a bit more about the history I’d ignored when I was sitting in the classroom. Simon Schama is a TV personality and academics are always bitchily suspicious of any historian who’s good at being on TV and being a celebrity. They will always want to assume that the histories they write are lightweight and insubstantial. “Academics are always bitchily suspicious of any historian who’s good at being on TV and being a celebrity” I read the three volumes of Schama’s A History of Britain quickly, because what they have in common with Shipman is that they are beautifully written. There’s a rhythm to them. Schama has mastered that real art of history where you give somebody reading it enough of a sense of detail that they feel the historian knows what they’re doing and that you come out of it knowing more, but without getting bogged down in the detail that you don’t need. Like Shipman, it’s a page-turner, though obviously on a really different scale of history. He manages to capture, at different points of the book, a real sense of what’s distinctive about British history. Yes, and he does that without ever being the trendy, right-on vicar. There’s a lightness to his touch as he punctures the myths of British history. He’s telling a story without being too snide about it all. Yes, and the Schama books are very readable. There are books I read at work and there are books I read in the evening. The Schama ones I could read quite happily in the evening without it feeling like work. A History of Britain goes right up to the modern period. It’s a different way of ending the book, because he offers very detailed portraits of Winston Churchill and George Orwell as two really important figures of 20th century British history. He describes them and their achievements at real length, but somehow whilst doing it seems to find a way of drawing together with it hundreds and hundreds of years of history. It’s a neat ending, because historians otherwise have the problem of where do you end? How do you stop the book becoming out of date? The way he ends with Churchill and Orwell wraps the book up really neatly."