#simon schama

[cheeri1yfrancis]

i love history coursework

[wholesomeobsessive]

As for Henry himself, you could practically smell the testosterone. Any way and anywhere he could flash his burly energy, he flashed it: in the saddle, on the dance floor or on the tennis court, where a besotted courtier wrote excitedly of the king’s skin glowing through his finely woven shirt. Six feet tall (had there ever been a short king of England since John?), Henry not only shone, he glittered, literally, his fingers a mass of rings and a diamond as big as a walnut hanging from a neck that was described by another admirer as long, thick and beautiful enough to belong to a woman. Henry dispensed his famous, breezy charm rather like the English weather, in sunny intervals alternating with long, cloudy spells and sudden bursts of heavy thunder. The charm was of the rib-poking, back-slapping, arm-around-the-shoulder, punch-in-the-belly kind, which, depending on the mood of the week, could betoken either rapid promotion or imminent arrest. Henry wallowed in the praise droolingly lavished on him by his courtiers and foreign ambassadors: Henry the gallant, Henry the clever, Henry the nimble, Henry the superstar. He was the only king with his personal band, hired to go touring with him and featuring the eighteen-year-old as lead singer-songwriter.

A History of Britain by Simon Schama

[alatarielqueen]

This just in, historian Simon Schama reveals Tostig Godwinson and Harold Hardrada were sapphic lovers.

[mythologyofblue]

"Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.” -Simon Schama, Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations

[quotelr]

The challenge for a nonfiction writer is to achieve a poetic precision using the documents of truth but somehow to make people and places spring to life as if the reader was in their presence.

Simon Schama

[worstjourney]

Shakespeare, comedy, tragedy, love, and death

You ever have one of those things you remember but just can't place? I knew that someone clever once said that Shakespeare's comedies teach you how to love, and his tragedies teach you how to die. I quoted it, such as I could, in an article I wrote about the Polar Party. No amount of searching turned up any substantial clue to the source of it, though, aside from some Cambridge priest including it in a sermon with as vague a recollection as I had, aside from the hint that it might have come from David Edgar.

I am pleased to announce that I now know exactly where it's from, thanks to having a hankering for half-remembered documentaries. It is in fact David Edgar, speaking to Simon Schama, towards the end of the second of his two-part study on Shakespeare which aired in 2012. [link leads to iPlayer where this show is miraculously still available.]

GOTCHA.

[heyho-simonrussellbeale]

Simon Russell Beale will be at two events at the Financial Times Weekend Festival on September 7h at Kenwood House, London.

The Poems that bring Us Joy with Allie Esiri and Simon Schama (this will also be available on demand after the festival)

Simon Russell Beale in conversation with Simon Schama (also available digitally and on demand)

[thequietabsolute]

bit of a surprise this but, 5,000 years of world history here and it’s ALL been good news 💯 (maybe)