James Walton

What on earth has happened to Simon Schama: The Romantics and Us reviewed

Have the culture wars driven him away from the values of thoughtful scholarship?

The most striking impression was of a man ill-advisedly throwing in his lot with today’s new orthodoxies: Simon Schama. Credit: BBC/Oxford Films/Eddie Knox
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  • The Romantics and Us

    BBC2, Friday

‘You may think our modern world was born yesterday,’ said Simon Schama at the beginning of The Romantics and Us. If you do, though, I can only imagine that you’ve never seen any history documentaries on television — where, as a rule, the modern world is born in whatever period the documentary happens to be about, from Ancient Rome to the 1980s.

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