Abstract
Abstract ‘Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is a work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock.’ Simon Schama brings to his study of landscape the skills and perspective of an historian whose work on the evolution of modern culture ill Holland and France has earned him well-deserved admiration for the quality of his insights and writing. Turning this historian's mind to landscape produces both the strengths and the weaknesses of tills rich and sparkling work. Schama's title is telling: ‘landscape and memory’ rather than ‘landscape and history’. There is no intention of narrating a progressive or even linear story of landscape as idea, design or representation, or of seeking to relate historical events to their landscape settings. The book is a series of vignettes, some more extended than others, whose subject-matter is the mutual construction of two inseparable partners: the ever-renewing matenal and organic natural world on the one h...
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