![]() ![]() ![]() Alfred the Great was a Dark Age Blair, 'half book-worm, half show-off', who picked up most of his ideas about Anglo-Saxon nationhood during a gap year in Rome. So Hadrian's Wall was not a flinty, Pict-busting barricade, but a primitive Romano-British shopping mall. I think he succeeds triumphantly, with a well-judged marriage of epigram and aperçu. As he says in his preface, he promises 'not just instruction but pleasure'. Now his iconoclasm is playful and entertaining, for 'young ladies', not fellow professionals. In his time, Schama has not been afraid to indulge in fundamental revisionism. Describing the Plantagenets' enforced recognition of Irish and Scottish grievances, he notes that: 'It had taken the rest of Britain to remind England how to be a nation.' Underlying everything he writes is a searching consideration of that most urgent and vexed of contemporary political questions: has British history unfolded 'at the edge of the world' or at the heart of it? Here, Schama leaves us in no doubt where his sympathies lie: 'The one thing,' he writes, 'a king of England could not afford was insularity.' He is also topically alert to non-English sensitivities. From a historiographical point of view, the result is an uncharacteristically conventional, but still colourful, account that explores the emergence of 'Great Britain' from an Iron Age twilight that Schama shows to have been rather more complex and a good deal less benighted than generally allowed. ![]()
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