Scribble, Scribble, Scribble: Writing on Ice Cream, Obama, Church

´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 distinguished 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 Charlotte Rampling and Hurricane Katrina to ´The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of The Osbournes´. 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.