“‘A History of Britain with Simon Schama’, is this year’s big-budget blow-out to maintain the BBC’s stature as the carrier of High Knowledge. Now it’s time to come home, to let history put the Great back into Great Britain. Great, because every step of Schama’s grand tour of digs and cathedrals, battlefields and museums, is filled with self- congratulation. Self-congratulation for the historian, for the corporation and, above all, the ‘nation’.” But can we trust it? – New Statesman 10/30/00