Right through British history we see this constant pull between piety and pragmatism, between deference to the monarch as a godlike figure, and a req… - Simon Schama

Landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from the strata of memory as layers of rocks... The book [Landscape and Memory] is a celebration of the improbable resilience both of the Earth and of the ability of these cultural contacts to survive the nightmares of late capitalism and late industrialization. I don't want to be understood as some anti-environmentalist, which I am most emphatically not, but I do have an argument with the notion that there is this determined history whereby technological society is necessarily going to mean oblivion for nature.

Part of me wants to say with Wordsworth: 'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.' But if you ask me was it worth it, I don't think it was. If you pin me against a wall and ask: 'Schama, do you think more human happiness than unhappiness emerged?' I have to say no.

To be fully MAGA is still to live, 24/7, within a parallel universe, hermetically closed off from the inconvenient intrusion of fact, blissfully captive to a fantastic theology.