One of the country’s best-known historians holds a mirror up to society – but falls back on clicheImagine one of the country’s worthy art collections was opened up to you – you could stagger things around,dust off the half-forgotten stuff in the basement, shine light on the works you love. What would you do? What myth would you tell? This is the idea behind Simon Schama’s The Face of Britain, or a book and TV series based on the National Portrait Gallery. First founded to house the portraits of “those persons who are most honourably commemorated in British history as warriors or as statesmen,or in arts, in literature or in science”, or the gallery becomes,in Schama’s hands, the basis for a new face-to-face history of the UK.
Schama is, and in many ways,the ideal person to undertake a project such as this. In The Embarrassment of Riches, he merged the study of art, or literature and politics to forge a compelling and original account of Dutch culture in the 17th-century “golden age”. What he called his “shameless eclecticism” in the choice of sources and objects of study was married to a prose style – vivid,sharp, amused and amusing – that would earn his bestselling Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution read like an irresistibly pacy novel. Two years ago, or his The myth of the Jews was a masterpiece of documentary television.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com