Simon Schama

Art and culture define us - but in an age of change, who are we now? In divided times, Simon Schama asks whether art, music and words can be the threads that bind us together.

From popular revolt to the obsession with the self, even to modern nationalism, Simon Schama explores the enduring and powerful legacy the romantics have left on our modern world.

Museums in Quarantine takes you on a virtual tour of national museum collections during the pandemic. You'll explore the hidden treasures and learn about their history. Experts and curators provide insights into the exhibits, giving a unique perspective on the art and artifacts. Don't miss this opportunity to visit museums from the comfort of your home!

Inspired by Kenneth Clark's ground-breaking BBC series from 1969, BBC Two's nine-part series Civilisations introduces a new generation to great masterworks of beauty and ingenuity. From the first marks on cave walls made forty thousand years ago, to the art of the present, Civilisations will offer the perspectives of three presenters, Simon Schama, Mary Beard and David Olusoga, on humanity's desire to create. They will travel far and wide across six continents to find answers to fundamental questions about human creativity. The series will examine what makes a civilisation. It will look at paintings, sculptures and architecture that have enriched, challenged and unsettled human beings across the world and reveal the artists who made them and the cultures that produced them.

The Story Of The Jews is a documentary series presented by Simon Schama. The series takes a look at the story of the Jewish experience from ancient times right up to the present day.

Simon Schama explores the life and times of William Shakespeare to shed a new and fascinating light on some of the greatest plays ever written. He asks the question: "What came first, Englishness, or Shakespeare's idea of it?" and produces a persuasive argument in favour of the latter.

This is not a series about things that hang on walls, it is not about decor or prettiness. It is a series about the force, the need, the passion of art... the power of art.

Stretching from the Stone Age to the year 2000, Simon Schama's Complete History of Britain does not pretend to be a definitive chronicle of the turbulent events which buffeted and shaped the British Isles. What Schama does do, however, is tell the story in vivid and gripping narrative terms, free of the fustiness of traditional academe, personalising key historical events by examining the major characters at the centre of them. Not all historians would approve of the history depicted here as shaped principally by the actions of great men and women rather than by more abstract developments, but Schama's way of telling it is a good deal more enthralling as a result. Schama successfully gives lie to the idea that the history of Britain has been moderate and temperate, passing down the generations as stately as a galleon, taking on board sensible ideas but steering clear of sillier, revolutionary ones. Nonsense. Schama retells British history the way it was-as bloody, convulsive, precarious, hot-blooded and several times within an inch of haring off onto an entirely different course. Schama seems almost to delight in the goriness of history. Themes returned to repeatedly include the wars between the Scots and the Irish and the Catholic/Protestant conflicts-only the Irish question remains unresolved by the new millennium. As Britain becomes a constitutional monarchy, Schama talks less of Kings and Queens but of poets and idea-makers like Orwell. Still, with his pungent, direct manner and against an evocative visual and aural backdrop, Schama makes history seem as though it happened yesterday, the bloodstains not yet dry.