Simon Schama (Simon Michael Schama) Biography

British historian, born in London, educated at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he was a fellow and Director of Studies in History from 1966 to 1976. He became Professor of History at Harvard University in 1980. His early works include Patriots and Liberators (1977), a study of Dutch political radicalism in the Napoleonic era, and The Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel (1979). He is best known for The Embarrassment of Riches (1987), his analysis of the cultural, economic, and social character of the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, and Citizens (1989), a reinterpretation of the French Revolution as the result of the ancien régime's loss of control of the progressive ethos it had fostered. Among his other works is the experimental Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations) (1991), a pair of ‘historical novellas’ investigating the disparity between events and their subsequent narration. Landscape and Memory (1995) ties in with a TV series.