Scribble, Scribble, Scribble: The Selected Writings of Simon Schama

Wednesday brought a pungent sheepy smell emanating from the greyish lamb and barley soup my mother optimistically called 'Taste of the Garden of Eden'. Expel me, please. Haddock in the air? That would be Thursday. The faintest whiff of roasting garlic? That would be what my sister and I uncharitably dubbed 'Friday Night Memorial Chicken'; a venerable object smeared on the breasts with a dab of marmite meant to cheer the bird up as it emerged defeated from the oven. Rattling inside the brittle cavity was that one solitary clove of garlic; the exotic knobble that my mother conceded as a romantic touch amid the iron regimen of her unvarying weekly routine. Cookery is not necessarily a subject one immediately associates with Simon Schama - one of Britain's most respected historians and commentators. But this selection of his occasional writings is a treasure trove of surprises. Passionate, provocative, entertaining and informative, Scribble, Scribble, Scribble ranges far and wide: from cookery and family to Barack Obama, from preaching and Shakespeare to Victorian sages, from Leonard Cohen and Hurricane Katrina to The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of The Osbornes. Never predictable, always stimulating, Scribble, Scribble, Scribble allows us to view the world, in all its diversity, through the eyes of one of its most original inhabitants.