SOURCE: “The Storyteller,” in New Republic, November 4, 2000, pp. 48–52.

In the following review, Foster offers a mixed assessment of A History of Britain and its BBC television adaptation, hosted by Schama.

The Problem with British history is that there is so much of it: “a great heap of Himalayas,” as J. H. Plumb once put it, looming behind each other to infinity. and the peaks have so often been scaled, their approaches investigated, their contours mapped: how can the story be told anew? Norman Davies recently tried one kind of reconnoiter in The Isles, disaggregating the usual combinations, “restoring” his versions of original names, trying to change the perspective from the core to the periphery by aggressively advancing Wales, Scotland and Ireland into the foreground. Simon Schama has taken on a similar task, enveloping the huge sweep of British history in a pincer movement: televisually from one side (A...