This is the final episode in Schama’s series, and the best. The “two Winstons” of the title are Winston Churchill, and “Winston Smith”, the fictional hero of George Orwell’s 1984, which Schama uses to refer to Orwell himself. Following the lives of these two obviously very different men, Schama explores several dimensions of Britain’s social and political history in the 20th Century. His narrative is witty, intelligent, and original. His comments on both men are right on the mark. I can tell that Schama got to know Orwell through his remarkable diaries and journalism, which were published in paperback in the 1970s, and made a profound impression on all sorts of people (myself included).
Schama is an astonishingly prolific English historian who has produced some of the most readable history books of this generation. It turns out that he has a good personality to present his ideas on television, and this series is extremely entertaining. It also gets better as the series goes. Schama is most at home in “modern” history (i.e. sixteenth century onward). So he rushes through through everything up to the Norman conquest in the first episode. The next two episodes focus on the Norman and Angevin kings and their soap-operatic struggles (everyone hold up their hands who picture Eleanor of Aquitaine as Katherine Hepburn). The first three episodes are not as good as the ones that follow. When Schama gets into the areas of social and economic history that he’s most comfortable in, the series becomes excellent.
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