SOURCE: “The Shaping Spirit,” in New Statesman and Society, April 21, 1995, pp. 37–38.

In the following review of Landscape and Memory, Curry objects to Schama's implicit liberal humanism and corresponding view of nature as a passive resource, both material and aesthetic, available for unrestricted use by mankind.

It is symptomatic of our times that one of the most popular living historians writing in English, and an impeccable liberal humanist at that, should turn to the subject of nature. Schama's new subject is landscape, historical memory, and—supplying the missing term in his title—the “immense and venerable stock of responses to nature” that is culturally encoded, and therefore decipherable, as myth.

His thesis [in Landscape and Memory] is that all human social and political enterprises, no matter how apparently hostile to nature and its incorporation as myth, have actually been saturated with them. But the bulk of this big book...