SOURCE: “A Novel Approach to History,” in Spectator, June 1, 1991, pp. 26–27.

In the following review, Carr offers a positive assessment of Schema's body of work

‘You can't find out truth by writing history. You can only get at it by writing novels.’ This was Gerald Brenan's advice to me as I was about to embark on a history of modern Spain. What on earth did the man, who had written in The Spanish Labyrinth the best history of contemporary Spain, mean by this surprising admonition? Dismayed and depressed. I brooded long over his words. I think he meant that the ‘professional historian’ cannot make any statement, risk any suggestion unsupported by his sources; the longer the footnotes citing them the better the history. He is tethered to his sources: his imagination hobbled by them. Yet history is the imaginative reconstruction of the past or it is nothing.

Simon Schama...