Simon Schama

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand and one, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

My castaway this week is a historian. His interests are wide. He's as much at home among the affluent charms of the seventeenth century Netherlands as he is in the bloodthirsty turn of eighteenth century France. People and paintings, food and music populate his works as easily as great events or political movements. He's now brought history to an ever wider audience as the author and presenter of the BBC television series A History of Britain. An Oxbridge exile who's found the freedom he needs teaching and working in America, he still thinks of the great English historians as patriarchs of the craft. You're not doing your job properly, he believes, unless you've equipped yourself with the skills to make history work with the broad reading public. He is Simon Sharma. So Simon, is it the communication of history that drives you as much as the history itself?

Simon Schama1:23

Well I do love the writing, and actually I do think in some of the models I revere, going all the way back to Herodotus, there was a gossipy relish. So there is this element of actually chatting by the campfire, which I think is wonderful. And I think actually if a historian only thinks of himself as undertaking a seminar and not spending time in a company of friends, the thing isn't going to come alive.

Presenter1:50

And not storytelling, which is what I think.

Simon Schama1:51

Storytelling is crucial. Historians are just the. Holding the baton of this tribal storytelling right between our grandpas and our grandchildren.

Presenter2:02

You do get criticised, nevertheless, by those kind of historians who are kind of chiseling away at the rock face of history. They say that you d you go less for the analysis and more for the atmosphere, that in a sense you're making some of it up. You're taking people to the front line in 1066 or to a bloodthirsty Paris in Revolution and you are imagining what it must have been like to be there. And they consider that it distorts the truth.

Simon Schama2:24

Yeah.

Simon Schama2:27

Right. Well, I don't think it does at all. I think actually, Macaulay, you're right. Impossible and bigoted and prejudiced in some ways, very profoundly insightful, you know, all of twenty-five years old, and said actually history must be burnt into the imagination before it can be received by the reason. Your first duty is absolutely to connect. You're asking people to see a kind of weird relationship with those who have gone before them. You're asking them to enter this company of people with whom they ought to have a connection.

Presenter2:56

And indeed, you do make these extraordinary connections. I mean, that is very much what you do, isn't it?

Simon Schama3:03

Yeah, sort of literally doodling.

Presenter3:04

I see one of the latest ones is I don't know whether it's latest, but certainly one that shocked me and I hadn't come across before was your saying that we'd replaced Anthony Eden with Nobby Styles. I mean, do you want to sell me that one, Quick? No, I don't. Sue is loss of Sue is replaced by winning a World Cup.

Simon Schama3:15

Uh

Simon Schama3:19

As we saw this bow

Simon Schama3:21

Um I suppose what I meant they were ten years apart, but when the Empire finally went down the drain with with Suez, a lot of the intense chest thumping, flag waking, need for tribal noise transferred itself to England, England.

Presenter3:37

More entertaining connections to come in the meantime. Tell me about your first piece of music.

Simon Schama3:41

First piece of music is Cole Porter, You're the Top, and he makes the most extraordinary connections. So Mahatma Gandhi rhyming with Napoleon Brandy, Inferno's Dante rhyming with the nose of Duranti. But my dad was the first music I heard was show tunes. Our house was full of show tunes, and my parents used to sing. You wouldn't know if supper was coming, or they'd go into another chorus of there's no business like show business. My mother thought she was Ethel Merman for a moment. I mean my father thought he was Ethel Merman, which was more worrying.

Speaker 34:13

Um

Speaker 34:16

You're the top

Speaker 34:18

You're my hat magandi.

Speaker 14:20

Uh

Speaker 34:21

You're the hot

Speaker 34:23

Your Napoleon branding. You're the purposeful light of a some of the insane.

Speaker 14:30

Uh

Speaker 34:30

You have a national gallery, your garbles salary, your cellar face.

Speaker 34:36

You're supplied.

Speaker 34:39

You're a turkey, Denny.

Speaker 14:41

You're the time.

Presenter4:44

You're the Top, sung by Cole Porter. In honour of your father, that one. He was, it seems from everything I've read about him, a kind of theatrical impresario manque, wasn't it?

Simon Schama4:53

Yeah, he was. He actually sold textiles for a living and he hated it. He used to walk me around the garment district in order to tell me what not to do. He said, This is a horrible life. I'm going to show you just how horrible it is. And he'd point to people and say, Him, he's an incredible crook. He's a scoundrel. I said, I've got the point, Dad. I've got the point. And I said, Do what your heart wants. His heart wanted. He was in love.

Speaker 15:11

Uh And

Simon Schama5:17

Jewish as he was, and East End boy though he was, he was so deeply in love with performed English language. So he gave you.

Presenter5:23

So he gave you all these books, did he? I mean he gave me a lot of money.

Simon Schama5:25

Yeah, no, we used to read we used to read part you know, in between Ethel Merman, we had Dickens readings out loud at home sometimes. And this got completely out of control because when my father's business got a bit ropey, as it often did, the way my mother used to say, this is not good, was to sort of quote David Copperfield. So the worst thing that she could say was, you're Mr. Macauber. And I used to my head was sort of, okay, we're off to the workhouse. Do I get second gruel? You know, we're in the workhouse. So this is totally horribly literal.

Presenter5:58

But he was kind of actor manager to your juvenile lead, apparently. He used to sort of put you on the platform. Right.

Simon Schama6:01

Yeah, he

Simon Schama6:03

Right. He he he took me the first Shakespeare we saw, it was absolutely extraordinary. It was Richard Burton, Henry V, and I was about eight years old or something. And I could smell what I thought was history. It was actually grease paint, but it was something I'd never smelt before. But this was in order to apprentice me to sort of doing these little freak Shakespeare recitations on uh um where all the others would be doing. So Patrick Spence or Mary had a little lamb. I I could still do it and I won't. The speech before Harfleur in a sort of s

Speaker 16:29

But where were you doing it? Where were you?

Simon Schama6:32

I was doing this at school and then we had these debating societies, little Jewish boys in white-on-white shirts with sort of knitted silk ties, debating in places like Stepney whether or not Britain should undertake unilateral nuclear disarmament. We were sort of 11-year-old Michael Fudz, really. And my father, he'd done his Cicero as well. He'd said, Okay, peroration not very good tonight. We used to break this stuff up.

Presenter6:59

Record number two.

Simon Schama7:01

Number two is really Sharma discovers classical music. We had I had a wonderful English teacher whose idea of a really great English lesson was to play Bach a lot of Poch and to avoid metaphysical poetry. I was knocked out by it, and I also had a friend who had an amazing resemblance to Sergeant Bilker, and he

Simon Schama7:20

sensing the Bach moment, stuck me in an armchair and said, Just listen to this.

Speaker 17:29

Uh

Speaker 17:58

Uh

Speaker 38:08

Uh

Presenter8:20

Uh

Presenter8:23

Jascha Heifitz playing part of the prelude to Bach sonata No. Three in E major. Apparently you were a gas bag at school, hm?

Simon Schama8:29

Yes, I was officially called at by a wonderful French teacher, Mr. Pasque, who used to put me in detention regularly.

Presenter8:36

The other link really one sees with what you do now and what you were then, i i goes back to your your mother, who apparently was a a terrific storyteller with a motherfucker. Oh, she still is.

Simon Schama8:44

Oh, she still is. She still is. She was born in 1911 and

Simon Schama8:50

She has an incredible memory. I mean, one thing in East Stan, but she didn't tell me until about a couple of months ago, was that in 1918, a blimp came down somewhere, and the assumption was that it was full of scarlet fever germs. It was sort of panic, end-of-war panic. And she, along with her mates, had made the mistake of rushing to see it. And they were quarantined for, to our horror, for about two months. And she was livid. She was a very feisty little girl who was known when she was made to wear a silk dress for a wedding, rather than wear this sort of emerald green silk number, she scissored it to pieces actually on the eve of the wedding. But you see the.

Presenter9:27

Again, there is the detail. I mean, all of these little bells ring there, don't they? There is the detail. There is the appetite, your hunger for history of your own roots too. Indeed, you went off in landscape and memory. You went to find your mother's roots in the train, didn't you?

Simon Schama9:37

Indeed you went off

Simon Schama9:39

I do. You went to find your mother's city, didn't you? Yes, my mother's family, the Steinbergs, came from area around the Nieman River, which at various times in its history was part of Poland or part of the Russian Empire, but was great timber. Gradually as I unpieced this sort of great grandparental history, it was clear that we were that most oxymoronic thing, Jewish lumberjacks.

Presenter10:01

Yeah.

Simon Schama10:01

I thought this is absolutely extraordinary, you know.

Presenter10:04

When you stood there on the banks of the river, you went to the bottom of the corner.

Simon Schama10:07

On the banks of the river. You felt the ghosts, absolutely. And then the stories my mother had told about being on the river barges and one of my great-uncles having a wolf scar. Who knows if it's true. But the story was always told that in hauling the timber at the beginning of the winter, at night at a camp, he was attacked. And such things did actually happen. In Landscape and Memory, I thought there was one really true epiphany when I found a Jewish cemetery out in one of these little timberland villages. The gravestones had actually literally been covered by grass and earth.

Simon Schama10:43

Just tiny part of the stone was visible with Hebrew lettering. And these gravestones, this subterranean world of Jewish generation after Jewish generation, gradually emerged from the earth. And this was at some point a home which had been completely innocent of catastrophe and murder and cruelty. And these people had buried their families, not knowing that the horror of the twentieth century would would fall over them.

Presenter11:10

Next record

Simon Schama11:13

This is to bring back on the desert island sixties. I had a great time in the sixties and when you have teenage children, as I do, you keep apologising for the sixties because they regard it as the beginning of the end of Western civilizations. We know it and all you old, we don't want to hear any more about you miserable self-indulgent hippies. And I thought I'd fed up apologising for the sixties. I want to hear the Rolling Stones.

Speaker 111:35

Uh

Simon Schama11:36

I saw her today at the reception.

Simon Schama11:43

A glass of wine in her hand

Simon Schama11:48

I knew she was gonna meet her connection.

Simon Schama11:53

At her feet was a Fort Louis May.

Simon Schama12:00

You

Speaker 112:00

Can't Always get

Simon Schama12:02

Yeah.

Speaker 112:02

What you want?

Presenter12:06

Rolling Stones, and you can't always get what you want. So, uh Simon Sharma, you went to Cambridge, where you were to get a a starred first, and you and you met perhaps the second, maybe the third, if we count parents plus teachers, a great influence in your life, the historian Jack Plum, so John Plum, as he became.

Speaker 112:21

Uh

Presenter12:22

He taught you, you say, how to write. I'm sure you already had a talent for it, but but can you kind of distil what how he taught you, what he was doing?

Simon Schama12:25

Yeah.

Simon Schama12:31

He he would we would um do incredibly

Simon Schama12:35

Close discussion of a single paragraph.

Presenter12:38

But the writing style

Simon Schama12:39

Absolutely. There was a sense that actually to make a connection, you needed really to make the furniture of the past, again, another Macaulay phrase, be physically vivid. You'd be no good as a historian if you couldn't describe, let's say, the pockmarks on Mirabeau's face. And he also said something which turned out to be very important: when you're in the library and you're looking for something really critical, very often the book it turns out you really want is next to the book to the one you were looking for. That was so true. I remember when I was doing boning up, and boy, I really had to bone up, for the Battle of Hastings, yet another Norman Chronicle propaganda account. Next to it was a book about horses. And I'm not from the horsey classes, I wouldn't know a fetlock if it hit me on the head. And it was all about where these horses came from. And you think of these enormous, great, you know, they were little things from Spain, mostly. But you could go on like.

Presenter13:32

But you could go on like that for everybody. We all know that, but standing at the library shelf, you know, suddenly seeing something else and something else.

Simon Schama13:36

What's up?

Simon Schama13:38

No, it says pick me, pick me. It's like going to the pet store actually and and you were wanting to go in and get a really butch Labrador and you come out with a little poodle, which is what we did actually.

Presenter13:39

Yeah.

Simon Schama13:49

Because the poodle says, take me, take me.

Presenter13:51

So you were you were one can see exactly how you were plugged into this kind of populist tradition through through this man plum back through Trevelyan and Macaulay and so on and and you started teaching at Christ at twenty one once you you were made a fellow straightaway.

Simon Schama13:56

True.

Simon Schama13:57

Yeah.

Simon Schama13:58

Better in the middle.

Speaker 114:01

Surprise.

Presenter14:04

You stay there for ten years, which uh well I mean, it does seem like a long time. Add the three years of being an undergrad, thirteen years, for a man who's obviously

Speaker 114:09

The three years

Presenter14:13

full of ambition, is not always patient, is l these days very peripatetic. Wha r how come you stuck there so long?

Simon Schama14:15

Not always.

Simon Schama14:21

You know, I liked teaching. I was moonlighting. I mean, I was as a journalist. I mean, I did work for the Sunday Times. And I was able to lead this kind of my Walter Mitty fantasy life a couple of days a week working on the colour supplement, doing history features. I mean, you could have gone on the escalator from humble teaching fellow to whatever it was. I mean, lots of people did this. But in the end, it wasn't for me, not to mention the rather important fact that Cambridge would never give me a job. Colleague gave me a job. Yeah, this is rather crucial. I was definitely not their cup of port.

Simon Schama14:56

After a bit.

Presenter14:57

But I'll be

Simon Schama14:57

The d

Presenter14:57

Uh

Simon Schama14:58

Oxford did, bless them, yes.

Presenter15:00

But you felt like a gerbil in a treadmill, you said.

Presenter15:03

Yeah, I didn't like the But But

Simon Schama15:04

Now I was happy in the company of fellows and I was very happy at Oxford. I I've been happy at Cambridge too, but I did I hated having to service the curriculum and having the sort of particular topics spelled out and then one's baby students would go into the school exams at the end and nothing that you taught them, even though you've been an incredibly good boy and you'd you've done the repeal of the Corn Laws ninety-four times um Bulgarian partitions came out. I actually had students coming out crying from the exam room.

Presenter15:33

Next piece of music.

Simon Schama15:35

Oh dear, it's um I've screwed up my life music from Eugene Onyegan. And this song is Lenski's aria before he goes off and completes the miserable chaos and calamity of his life. It's awful and it's wonderful.

Speaker 115:54

Uh

Speaker 315:55

Is a cloud.

Speaker 116:00

Red

Speaker 316:03

Just replun the

Simon Schama16:08

Yeah.

Speaker 316:17

Dear me for it, just a cringe one way God was lovely and within.

Simon Schama16:30

Here's what I'm doing.

Simon Schama16:35

Yeah.

Speaker 116:35

Uh

Simon Schama16:35

God lost love you.

Speaker 316:38

Um Each

Speaker 116:39

Yeah.

Presenter16:47

Stuart Burroughs as Lensky singing his Farewell to Life from Act Two of Tchaikovsky's Eugene on Jegin with the orchestra of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden conducted by Sir George Schulte. So some seventeen years um really, Simon Shalma, you were at Oxbridge.

Presenter17:02

But in the last few years you met your wife Ginny, an American, at Oxford, and she's now professor of genetics at Columbia University.

Speaker 117:05

At Oxford.

Speaker 117:09

Okay.

Presenter17:10

And in the end you both of you went off to America. This was your great liberation. What about this for a theory, that that that actually you were a late developer who had to find a a good woman to give you the confidence to give your flair and originality full throttle?

Simon Schama17:25

Yes, absolutely right. How dare you contradict? No, exactly. Yes, it's either.

Presenter17:27

Have a day you're going to

Simon Schama17:33

Agree with that brilliant insight, how wise, how true, or get divorced. So I think I'll take how wise, how true. No, it's absolutely true. And she was.

Presenter17:41

But it's it's interesting you you because you then came out of that pigeonhole I keep mentioning and were allowed to roam free, it seems to me, by Harvard across all these things and bring in art, history.

Simon Schama17:50

Yes, in fact at Oxford I was already fooling around with anthropology a great deal. I had wonderful help actually and I I don't want to I mean when you said it was my great liberation it sounds like Sharma breaks out of cold it's

Presenter18:06

Well that's how it reads.

Simon Schama18:07

But it just wasn't any way to bring art history and anthropology and history together. And the great thing about Harvard was that you could do this.

Presenter18:18

Obviously, that's terribly satisfying. What it also means, though, as I say, is that you can do what you want to do. And obviously, what you want to do.

Presenter18:27

It's a bit like you talking about the next book on the shelf. You seem to me to want to leap across to the next thing that inspires you, and that can even be, as I read it, sitting in a Bavarian cafe, seeing lots of women with little bits of bird in their hats, thinking

Simon Schama18:37

Even B

Simon Schama18:42

Right.

Presenter18:43

Uh

Simon Schama18:43

Uh

Simon Schama18:44

Uh

Presenter18:44

Uh

Simon Schama18:44

That's right. You do. Often the next thing is actually prompted by mistakes I feel I've made. And in Landscape and Memory, it was on exactly right, a book tour in Germany of the German translation of The Embarrassment of Riches. And I remember ending up in Munich with both jet lag, a cold and a terrible hangover. And to come to, I was fed some nourishing soup and looked around, and there indeed there were these ladies with birds on their heads, with these little hats. They were all wearing hairy laden coats, and the old birds' partridges seemed to have settled on their heads. I said incredibly rudely, what is it with you Bavarians and the woods? And this did make me think, well, the embarrassment of riches was about a culture that was embattled with its geography, water, the Low Countries, many other places, Britain, Germany certainly. As soon as they start describing the relationship between feeling British or feeling German, talk about a countryside that they dream has never changed. In Germany's case, a serious case of woodsiness. So it's a it's a boring, long, complicated story, but it made me enter this kind of forest of symbols.

Presenter19:54

Next piece of music.

Simon Schama19:56

Oh, the next piece of music is is a Bob Dylan song. This one, Simple Twist of Fate. It is a perfectly conceived and executed poem. The writers I most envy are poets. Poets are have this extraordinary imaginative precision and, even as my most loyal readers will know, conciseness, succinctness. I'm not really very good at that. So this is a perfect poem.

Speaker 320:23

As she was walking home by the arcade

Speaker 320:26

As a light bust through a peat-up shade where he was waking up.

Speaker 320:33

She dropped the coin into the cup.

Presenter20:37

I love a blind man at the gates, And forgot about his simple twist of fate.

Presenter20:53

Simple twist of fate, sung by Bob Dylan. Um so Simon Sharman, within a couple of years of the embarrassment of riches came Citizens, nineteen eighty nine, Bicentenary of the French Revolution, another blockbuster well the big blockbuster bestseller.

Speaker 121:02

But I

Simon Schama21:05

Yeah.

Presenter21:07

Everywhere but in France. French rights never bought, I understand. I mean, I.

Simon Schama21:11

No, I mean it was two reasons, both of them pretty compelling. One, everybody was writing a French Revolution history. People had serious French Revolution fatigue in France. But there was also the case that this book was represented as, quote, a Reaganite history, because I'd said rude things, not just about the terror. Not rude, but I'd had a dark view of the Revolution from the beginning.

Presenter21:34

Indeed, I mean you you know, it it it was pretty harsh in the sense that you you said that violence was was the motor of the revolution, and indeed for a while you said it it was its end, too. How did you arrive at that? I mean how did you arrive?

Simon Schama21:47

I didn't set out thinking that was going to be a conclusion. And when I said motor, I did mean that at each stage of the revolution, regimes changed when

Simon Schama21:59

Really, physical force was let loose on whoever the object of current disapproval happened to be. From the beginning, from the you know, the 14th of July, the taking of the Bastille ends with the kind of cold-blooded murder of the man who turned the guns on the crowd, and people are being strung up around Paris. So, this sense in which actually people who are held to be responsible need to be seen to be punished was seen to me tragically always part of the formula and spoiled the party from the beginning.

Presenter22:32

But you say you didn't set out to write it that way. I thought it would be.

Simon Schama22:34

I thought it would be actually happiness which would slowly darken into tyranny, which is the conventional republican view, basically.

Presenter22:42

So how did you come upon your view?

Simon Schama22:46

It sounds absurdly sanctimonious by simply sort of seeing and telling the truth. I mean, there's no way round that fact.

Presenter22:52

But by reading contemporary accounts, yes.

Simon Schama22:54

Contemporary accounts yes, yes. I mean, if you think a bit about the Marcia's, which is the most wonderful national anthem ever written, buried inside this wonderful song is the wish to have the blood of tyrants abre ven ocean irrigate our furrows.

Presenter23:10

You probably had nightmares when you were writing.

Simon Schama23:11

Yeah, I did. Not in costume, lest we think this is ridiculous, but I I did absolutely have dreams of being followed down the street and put in and in the dark.

Presenter23:19

So, again, by definition, you are not the cool, dispassionate.

Presenter23:24

Olympia. You're a participant. You are the judge and the jury.

Simon Schama23:25

Really?

Presenter23:29

Yes. Yes. What therefore does the amateur reader and presumably there have been quite a few have come to this book because it was a bestseller, people who don't know a lot about history what are they to take from it? Are they to read it and think

Simon Schama23:29

Yes, yes.

Simon Schama23:37

Yeah.

Presenter23:43

This is how it was, or are you saying this is how it probably was? Or are you saying this is how I imagine it might have been?

Simon Schama23:47

Well

Simon Schama23:49

No, I mean the uh no probably was is good. You do try and get it as close as you can, notwithstanding the fact that you're removed in time and sensibility. You Put yourself in someone else's shoes. If if if a reader comes out and says, I have been in this place as close as I will ever get to it, and I have now understood something about the human condition, that's a job reasonably well done.

Presenter24:18

Record number six.

Simon Schama24:20

This is punk rock. You're talking to someone who hated glam rock. But I we were stuck with it in the seventies and the mid-seventies, and then improbably at a Hogmanay in a Hebridean island surrounded by extremely aristocratic and upper-class people, I heard the sex pistols really for the first time. But there was something about the clash and the sex pistols, great as they were, that was sort of pretentious. And the Ramones are just naughty boys from Queens. And the song is I Wanna Be Sedated, which they probably put out on my tombstone when I die.

Simon Schama24:52

Yeah.

Speaker 124:52

Uh

Simon Schama24:53

In the 2023 I'm a single mobile on the seventh day

Simon Schama24:58

Not the hell of a good I want to see secondary

Simon Schama25:03

Give me to the airboard and put me on a pain. Hurry up, rim of a seed. Kinkin's overdose, kicking some of it on the

Simon Schama25:13

Ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba What a misa de

Presenter25:18

Eramones and I Wanna Be Sedated. You've taken a a similar approach to a history of of Britain for BBC television, Simon. There are stories in there's a human dramas, but in an intrinsic dramatic structure.

Presenter25:33

It's also quite broad brush, so bits have got squ I mean the War of the Ro Wars of the Roses got a bit squeezed, don't you?

Simon Schama25:39

Yes, we had the only way to do it. I mean, fifteen hours is a lot of television, but it's never enough. And if you actually are going to give every king their own moment.

Simon Schama25:47

it's impossible. It just becomes like a sprint through Madame to Swords or something. And now there has to be a big narrative art, really does. And you and in order for that to happen, the cast characters can't be too big. And to do the Richard II story,

Speaker 125:51

Yeah.

Speaker 125:54

Yeah.

Simon Schama26:01

And the peasants' revolt takes time. So we did say Uhoh, bye bye Richard the Third, and we knew there'd be countless fans of Richard the Third who would just be furious with us.

Presenter26:12

But you you obviously love th the business of television itself. You like doing the pieces to come. I mean you still you're the juvenile.

Simon Schama26:17

You're the juvenile, not the juvenile. No, I was so pathetically bad at the beginning. I overperformed, really. I think I sort of shouted at the camera. I was such an idiot. I thought, well, if notwithstanding you had the body mic, if the camera is like, you know, 200 yards away, you had to go, hello! So there's a tremendous amount of kind of hooting at the camera, and until the suite director said, actually, we can hear you, Simon. Oh, right.

Speaker 126:30

Yeah.

Speaker 326:30

Yeah.

Speaker 126:31

Yeah.

Simon Schama26:40

Yeah.

Presenter26:40

But your father would have been very proud of this one.

Simon Schama26:40

But your father

Simon Schama26:42

He would have liked the hooting bits, yes. No, he would have loved the whole thing. He would have loved the whole thing, I think it's fair to say.

Presenter26:43

Uh

Presenter26:45

Yeah.

Presenter26:47

Epod number seven.

Simon Schama26:49

Number seven is the life force music. It's the it's the beginning of the last movement. It's the last movement of Schubert's great C major symphony, the ninth symphony. It's ultimate cheer-up music by a man who had so much sadness in his life. If I'm ever f in danger of feeling sorry for myself, some critic has said something particularly poisonous, the way to stop whining is to put this on.

Presenter28:13

The opening of the last movement of Schubert's Symphony No. nine, the Great C major, played by the Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Sir George Schulte. Describe to me, Simon, if you will, the the landscape you live in now in America, just outside New York, when you sit in your study and look out of the window for inspiration.

Simon Schama28:28

It is amazing. It's amazingly beautiful. It's about 25 miles north of New York City. It's the Hudson Valley, which is a glacial gorge, and the air is rather pearly and wet. We can hear coyotes, which ever heard coyotes? Sounds like a ten-year-old birthday party out of control. Strange, demented cackling, actually. Very scary. In March, in the spring, because there's a lot of wetland down below the hill as well. Tiny frogs, the first sound of the frulingsnacht, the sort of spring night song, are these minute.

Simon Schama29:02

frogs called peepers. And you d you sit out on the deck and you hear this amazing chorus of of peepas, which is tells you it's not going to be that cold for too much longer.

Presenter29:14

So it's where you can work. It is where you find one.

Simon Schama29:15

It is where you find it. Wonderful to work there, yes.

Presenter29:18

And

Presenter29:19

What sort of inspiration are you going to be looking for next? I I do a lot of people have said this, I think, but I mean surely there's a there's a novel in there.

Simon Schama29:28

I I keep on thinking um I'm conscious of the sort of comedian who would want to play Hamlet. I mean I would like to write a novel and I'm very interested in the collision of the French and the British in Egypt and both of their in the seventeen nineties and their collision with Egyptian hieroglyphs and the tombs and a place where the bone-headed optimism and the enlightenment meets the darkness of Rameses and Assiris.

Simon Schama29:57

Well, it sounds like not only a novel, but a really bad novel.

Simon Schama30:00

So rather intrigued by that.

Presenter30:02

But stranded on this this desert island we're sending you to.

Simon Schama30:04

The second one.

Presenter30:06

How would you say if you were never to come back? How would you like us to remember you? Would you as a historian first and a writer second? Or?

Simon Schama30:13

No, I'd like there not to be a distinction really. I'd like to be a historian, a writer who wrote about the past.

Presenter30:20

Last record.

Simon Schama30:22

Despite all this sort of shouting at cameras, there is an inward shama. And it's Beethoven, one of the Beethoven late-string quartets, 131, and the beautiful first movement. And partly doing this for the unscrupulous reason, it's the only quartet I know that has seven movements. So I get the sort of bonanza. And not unlike the Ramones, I have to say, Beethoven meant all of these movements to be. It's true. Stop laughing. You cannot make this movement. Absolutely. He meant these movements to be done almost without interruption. But he wouldn't have said one, two, three, four. It's quite true, if you must.

Presenter30:46

Uh

Speaker 130:46

I do.

Presenter31:56

Part of the first movement of Beethoven's string quartet number fourteen in C sharp minor, played by the Quartetto Italiano. You're walking into the sea music, Simon.

Simon Schama32:05

It is, yes, in some soupy sunset.

Presenter32:09

If you could only take one of those eight records, which one would you take?

Simon Schama32:13

I think it would probably have to be the Schubert, really. If I had the Beethoven, I'd I might walk into the sunset on day one, really. So I should I should give this Desert Island a crack a bit and Schubert would be good for get up and girlishness.

Presenter32:28

What about your book?

Simon Schama32:30

I think I'm going to take The Leopard by Giuseppe de Lambaduza. It's an amazing meditation on time.

Simon Schama32:37

It's the most perfect novelised account, really, and not just something that happened a long time ago, but what time does to us. We feel it travelling through our lives. It's very moving. At the end, there's an old dog called Bendico who belonged to this prince in Sicily in the 19th century, and the very last scene in this book is where this dog has become a rug and it's a piece of rubbish and it's thrown out the window. The very last sentences of the book are, for a moment this dog is suspended in mid-air and could be seen in all his doggy animation, worst that affair. And then he became a livid heap of dust. And I thought, well, that's what historians are supposed to do. You're supposed to catch the dog in flight.

Presenter33:19

And your luxury.

Simon Schama33:20

My luxury is going to be Rembrandt's Bathsheba. There are going to be no women on this island and it's going to be a completely lonely experience. It's a painting about the kind of beauty of and also about sorrow of the relationship between men and women. But it's a fantastic eye fall and I just have to somehow create climate control for it. I'm not quite sure how that's going to work.

Presenter33:42

Simon Sharma, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island is.

Simon Schama33:45

Thank you for having me.

Speaker 333:53

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.