A dismaying exercise in nostalgia: Simon Schama’s History of Now reviewed

For those who consider themselves traditional liberals (full disclosure: such as me) Sunday’s first episode of Simon Schama’s History of Now may have felt like a somewhat dismaying exercise in nostalgia. As Schama ran through a familiar anthology of 20th-century liberalism’s greatest hits, we were taken back to a happier, more recognisable world of clearly demarcated goodies and baddies where democracy would inevitably mean the triumph of our own beliefs and there was little that couldn’t be fixed by art ‘speaking truth to power’.

The programme’s starting point, as you might imagine, was the Spanish Civil War, described by Schama as a ‘great battle between democracy and autocracy’ – rather than, say, two autocracies. In this case, the truth-speaking art was Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, which Schama movingly analysed without mentioning the awkward fact that the power it spoke truth to took no notice. Instead, the painting now became the archetype for other art that shaped the post-war liberal commitment to the individual, from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.