SOURCE: “The Big Cake,” in New York Review of Books, September 21, 1995, pp. 8, 10–12.

In the following review, Thomas offers a favorable assessment of Landscape and Memory.

In the first paragraph of this extraordinary book [Landscape and Memory], Simon Schama reveals that his favorite childhood reading was Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill. Fellow-enthusiasts of this enchanting idyll will not be surprised to learn that it fired his historical imagination. Kipling's story tells how, through the magic of Oak, Ash, and Thorn, the fairy Puck provides the two children, Dan and Una, with a series of enthralling brief encounters with Roman centurions, Norman knights, and other historical figures. Each of these reminisces about the past and then tantalizingly fades away to turn back into one of the children's present-day neighbors, like old Hobden, the hedger, or his son, the Bee Boy, “who is not quite right in his head, though he...