I was just listening to last week’s Start the Week, from the Cheltenham Literary Festival. We shall leave aside that nice Robert Fox, who, according to google, writes for the Guardian, and his thoughts about Herodotus and Thucydides being “dashed good reporters”, and the eyewitness nature of Pericles Funeral Oration, because it leads to irateness where there need be none. For the programme featured Simon Schama, the celebrity historian most dear to my heart because he does his own research, writes a dream and does incredibly good analysis-through-narrative, and because his book on the French Revolution is A-Mazing, talking to Andrew Marr, BBC reporter/presenter who would have all my devotion even if I hadn’t seen the clips of him doing the Timewarp in pink fishnet tights and leather shorts for Children in Need, about American history and politics. My brain went to its happy place of nerdiness.
