A HISTORY OF BRITAIN – VOLUME 1: AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD? 3000 BC – AD 1603 – Buy it here
‘History clings tught but it also kicks loose,’ writes Simon Schama at the outset of At the Edge of the World?, the first book in his three-volume journey into Britain’s past. And change – sometimes gentle and subtle, sometimes shocking and violent – is the dynamic of Schama’s unapologetically personal and grippingly wirtten history. At its heart lie questions of compelling importance for Britain’s future as well as it past: what makes or breaks a nation? To whom do we give our allegiance and why? And where do the boundaries of our community lie – in our hearth and home, our village or city, tribe or faith? what is Britain – one country or many? What is Britain – one country or many? Has British history unfolded ‘at the edge of the world’ or right st the heart of it?
Schama delivers these themes in a form that is at once traditional and excitingly fresh. the great and the wicked are here – Becket and Thomas Cromwell, Robert the Bruce and Anne Boleyn – but so are countless more ordinary lives, depcited in Schama’s brilliant portrait of the life of the British people.
PUBLISHER: Bodley Head
PUBLICATION DATE: November 2009
