The academic’s look at truth, democracy and art has its heart very much in the right place. But too often it’s fighting old battles rather than grasping the modern reality of untruths
‘I came into the world to the soundtrack of history,” says Simon Schama as his new series begins, explaining that he was born on 13 February 1945, when Nazi rockets were falling on London and allied bombs were devastating Dresden. If that sounds like a Partridgean piece of self-aggrandisement, it’s forgivable: the three-part Simon Schama’s History of Now (BBC Two) is unabashedly a personal overview of the postwar era, and the art and literature that shaped it.
Episode one, subtitled Truth and Democracy, deals with what Schama sees as an era-defining battle between totalitarianism’s suppression of truth and artists’ unextinguishable yearning to tell it. An admiring glance at Picasso’s Guernica leads into an assessment of the disinformation battle running alongside the Spanish civil war, and how being on the wrong end of fascist lies inspired George Orwell to turn propaganda into dystopian fiction. Then, as the hot war of the 1930s and 40s turns cold, we’re in the Soviet Union in the late 50s, where Boris Pasternak knew the dissident sentiments within his epic novel Doctor Zhivago would lead to it being censored, but persevered and, following an exciting series of incidents involving smuggled manuscripts and CIA-backed publications abroad, won the Nobel prize.
