Great art has dreadful manners. The greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure, and then proceed in short order to re-arrange…

- Simon Schama

Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough…

- Simon Schama

Charlie Hebdo: Satire was the father of true political freedom, born in the 18th century; the scourge of bigots and tyrants. Sing its praises.

- Simon Schama

Histories never conclude; they just pause their prose. Their stories are, if they are truthful, untidy affairs, resistant to windings-up and sortings…

- Simon Schama

From 1789, perhaps even before that, it had been the willingness of politicians to exploit either the threat or the fact of violence that had given t…

- Simon Schama

Landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock. It is... difficult to think of a…

- Simon Schama

Even for the most excitable preacher, there was nothing inherently sinful about a waffle.

- Simon Schama

Irreverence is the lifeblood of freedom.

- Simon Schama

What can art really do in the face of atrocity?

- Simon Schama