SOURCE: “Not a Lonely Genius,” in Spectator, October 30, 1999, pp. 54–56.

In the following review, Hensher offers an unfavorable assessment of Rembrandt's Eyes.

Simon Schama's enormous and exhausting book [Rembrandt's Eyes] is a wilfully old-fashioned examination of the life of this greatest of painters. He has made a career out of immense narrative histories, whose selling point is that they debunk the received wisdom of historians. In his previous books, I think this approach has often paid off handsomely. Citizens, for instance, his history of the French Revolution, successfully spoiled the appetite for the bicentennial with its emphasis on the Terror, its portrait of the Revolution as something which came close to genocide. It was a startling but surely useful book; the witterings of French historians on the historical necessity of the Terror have to be read to be believed, and Schama always retained a sense of the Revolution's cruelty...