British - Historian | February 13, 1945 -
I wrote a staggeringly bad poem when I was 19 after a girlfriend dumped me. I seem to remember comparing her to a tarantula. It was all very E. J. Thribb of me.
Simon Schama
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I understood when I was quite small that there were two special things about the Jews. That we'd endured for over 3,000 years despite everything that had been thrown at us, and that we had an extraordinarily dramatic story to tell.
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It's not right to think about all of Jewish-German history as shrouded by the smoke of the crematorium.
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Jews can live their own life as Jews and yet be part of a different country.
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The Jewish story is the story of wandering. It is the story of extraordinary heterogeneous complication.
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The notion that religion can actually be something... attached to progressivism seems so bizarre. But all you have to say is that Abolition wouldn't have happened without it. The way in which African Americans managed to achieve a degree of self-determination was through the church.
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I would want the British reader to feel that religion in America isn't an absurd thing - a sign of a pin head athwart a gigantic body.
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By the end of the nineteenth century, the stereotype of the ugly American - voracious, preachy, mercenary, and bombastically chauvinist - was firmly in place in Europe.
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In the early nineteenth century, with Enlightenment optimism soured by years of war and revolution, critics were skeptical of America's naive faith that it had reinvented politics.
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The British who arrived in the United States in the eighteen-thirties and forties had imagined the young republic as a wide-eyed adolescent, socially ungainly and politically gauche, but with some hint of promise.
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The default mode of modern writing about art is to despise any notion of singularity as so much overheated genius-fetishism.
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I have this magpie instinct for the next glittering object. There are one or two things I know I can't write about, though: DIY, cricket, automobile repair. I could study it for a lifetime and not produce a word on the carburettor.
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