Simon Schama's History of Now is an earnest appeal against political apathy Review: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Schama’s Forrest Gump-esque journey through the art of the last 70 years rails against any notion of political apathyOn 13th February 1945, German rockets rained down on London. In Dresden, bombs dropped by the Allied powers killed tens of thousands of civilians. It also happened to be the night historian Simon Schama, now 77, was born.
The first episode, “Truth and Democracy”, did not have to stretch to draw parallels between history and what we watch on the news now. Schama, stood in front of Picasso’s, compared how Soviet forces falsified evidence in the Spanish Civil War with Putin’s war on truth around his invasion of Ukraine, China’s attempts to scrub unflattering events from records, and the USA’s reckoning with the legacy of slavery.
Schama is always a compelling presenter but here, he was more than a messenger, offering something of a call to arms as he emotionally recounted memories of watching Václav Havel address crowds of Czech protestors on television, and considered that today we appear to be at a historical crossroads of our own. He self-identifies as “an old man [who doesn’t] want to die with the world selling its soul down that particular crummy river” of political apathy.
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