Customer Reviews
Television at its best - By: Grover, 25 Jul 2008 
Simon Schama is like the history teacher we should all have had, bringing the rich & fabulous history of Britain to life. Tremendous television & it is sets a benchmark for history programmes to match up to
Simon Schama's History of Britain, But Not Everyone's - By: R. M. Hillier, 24 May 2008 
Having thoroughly enjoyed Schama's short series on art history - Caravaggio, David et al - I was excited to see his epic History of Britain. The 15-hour experience left me stone cold & empty. Schama is very selective about what he believes constitutes a history of Britain, & generally his excerpts from the last millenium are all the grotty bits, He is also an expert at finding grot even among the great ages of our history. He belongs, I suppose, among the common despisers of Western culture, who like to bash the heritage & traditions that have made us what we are, & he does soin such appallingly superficial ways. In the episode on eighteenth-century Britain, for example, he is more interestedin the evils of our colonial history & the birth of America thanin the rather momentous Napoleonic Wars that were brooding & then explodingin Europe. Notice how whenever he lands a particularly large sucker punch at British history, he deftly uses the first person plural pronoun "us British" or "we British", a move which brings him into the territory of his subject matterin a particularly cunning way, as if to say "we are all guilty of this, me too." Given that he has resided & spent most of his timein New York City at Columbia University for many years now, his contempt for this country is apparent. Still, he built his reputation & esteem on debunking our country's history, & that earned him his fat professorship at an Ivy League University, so we can't be all that bad, can we? No country's history is without its share of guilt & responsibility, & not to admit it is a gross falsification of reality, but to be this damning with such mercilessly faint praise makes one wonder why he embarked on this projectin the first place. "Great" Britain this is not.
Every home should have this - By: Francesca Cook, 28 Mar 2008 The only thing better & more informative than this superb piece of quality BBC tv is the enormous audio book version. Take the Victorian era - you get 12 hours of fascinating history read by Timothy Westin place of a couple of hours of tv time, & the whole series takes forever to listen to! The audio series is vast, detailed & even more enlightening & shows Simon Schama's depth of knowledge is even more immense than the tv series indicates!
But the tv series is good to start with & takes you through the history of the islesin a way that schools don't appear to. This is so important because if you don't know why the UK is the way it is, & how it got like that, you can't know where it's going. A History Of Britain ought to be repeated oncein a while, but until it is I say buy this & learn what made this country the way it is.
The greatest of all popular historians - By: Mrs. N. L. Vincendeau, 17 Jan 2008 I remember watching this series on television & being desperate to see the next transmission each time an episode ended. So I was delighted to receive the complete series on DVD!
Simon Schama is so engaging & charming that any slight problems viewers may have about the fact that he sometimes summarises "important" historical events can be counterbalanced by the clear presentation.
His choice of subject matter gives you a comprehensive overview of British history, covering all aspects from invasion to empire building to the decline of our international influence, & has so much to recommend it, it's hard to know where to start. He is a great story teller, the events he describe need little dramatisation but where there is some it is very impressive, visually. I also want to mention the music, which is highly original & really adds something to the whole tone of the documentaries.
Overall I would thoroughly recommend Simon Schama as a guide through British History - even the most dedicated of amateur historians will find something within his "History of Britain" they didn't know. And it'll probably leave you with a hunger to find out more.
History brought alive! - By: Don Ramsey, 09 Dec 2007 Simon Schama narrates the History of Britainin a way which is close to being addictive. Of course, any attempt to telescope over 1,000 years into 6 DVDs has limitations, but they are physical limitations. At the end, one is left hungry for more, & with the realisation that there are so many stories intertwinedin our history that one can only sample a few of them at a time.
If understanding our history can help us get a better perspective on our present, never mind assist our aspirations for the future, then surely history should be a compulsory subject for everyone, no matter which academic theme they might choose to explore!
