The Embarrassment of Riches

'The Embarrassment of Riches is well-named. Schama's method is wonderfully inclusive; with wit and intense curiosity he teases out meaning form every aspect of Dutch seventeenth-century life, from ideas about sea monsters to obsessions about hygiene. One reads it all with mounting enjoyment and at the end one's sense of Dutch civilisation in the Golden Age of Rembrandt and van Diemen is not just salted and enriched -- but remade.' Robert Hughes'Simon Schama writes with grace and wit, and his enthusiasms are contagious. Above all, this is a labour of love -- love of an ethical system, of a physical landscape, and of an emotional husbandry that perfectly balanced the material with the moral. The lightheartedness and energy that charactize the author and his marvellous book are the finest tribute he could have paid to the subject of his choice.' Anita Brookner, Observer'This is history on the grand scale, and like all generously conceived historical works leaves us reflecting about the present as well as the past.' John Gross, New York Times'Schama is a scholar with the rare gift of talking to non-scholars without talking down... What is really breathtaking about the book is his command of overall structure, that enables him to construct such a complex and sophisticated argument without ever losing narrative drive, to generalize only from innumberable particularities, which somehow always remain in proportion, and are never allowed to clog the massive flow.' John Russell Taylor, The Times'Seldom has a people opened its doors so wide. A performance on the epic scale.' Independent