Foreign Bodies

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'This splendid and often moving work of history... Schama has a gift for combining novelistically colourful detail, serious analysis and wryly amusing asides' Daily Telegraph 'Superb' Observer 'Extraordinary... A meticulous retelling of a terrible yet scientifically innovative period... Makes an urgent case for building a better future on our toxic past' Guardian 'This is history of the best sort - humanly engaged but never sentimental' Mail on Sunday Cities and countries engulfed by panic and death, desperate for vaccines but fearful of what inoculation may bring. This is what the world has just gone through with Covid-19. But as Simon Schama shows in his epic history of vulnerable humanity caught between the terror of contagion and the ingenuity of science, it has happened before. Characteristically, with Schama the message is delivered through gripping, page-turning stories set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: smallpox strikes London, cholera hits Paris, plague comes...

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More by Simon Schama