Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations), by Simon Schama (Knopf, 333 pp., $26)
THAT truly profound thinkers such as Paul Johnson are eschewed and marginalized by the historical establishment speaks chapters, if not multi-volume official histories, about the state of the discipline. To attempt any break from the historiographical herd, away from its sententious revisionism, is to risk derision and perhaps permanent ostracism. Sizing up this situation, historian Simon Schama has adopted a mix of historical fact and speculative fiction—a strategy of indirection not unlike that used by one of the central characters in his latest volume, General James Wolfe, at the battle of Quebec.
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