SOURCE: “Our Island Story,” in Spectator, October 28, 2000, pp. 64–65.

In the following review, Carr offers a favorable assessment of A History of Britain.

We once learnt our history by reading books as active collaborators with the historian, turning the printed world into mental pictures of the past. Television has altered all this. With historians turning to writing television scripts we are now passive spectators of ready-made images of the past. Simon Schama's TV version of his Landscape and Memory was rich enough in images. Yet it did not provide his viewers with what they wanted: a narrative history of great events and of the personalities who made them happen or were destroyed by them. This is precisely what this book [A History of Britain] and the television series that is based on it aim to do. To dramatise a single decisive event, such as the Battle of Britain, is...