Wordy cover art

Wordy

 Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Wordy

By: Simon Schama
Narrated by: Simon Schama, Gareth Armstrong
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

About this listen

 ‘Wordy is about the intoxication of writing; my sense of playful versatility; different voices for different matters: the polemical voice for political columns; the sharp-eyed descriptive take for profiles; poetic precision in grappling with the hard task of translating art into words; lyrical recall for memory pieces. And informing everything a rich sense of the human comedy and the ways it plays through historical time.

It's also a reflection on writers who have been shamelessly gloried in verbal abundance; the performing tumble of language - those who have especially inspired me - Dickens and Melville; Joyce and Marquez.’ Simon Schama

Sir Simon Schama has been at the forefront of the arts, political commentary, social analysis and historical study for over forty years. As a teacher of Art History and an award-winning television presenter of iconic history-based programming, Simon is equally a prolific bestselling writer and award-winning columnist for many of the world’s foremost publishers, broadsheet newspapers, periodicals and magazines.

His commissioned subjects over the years have been numerous and wide ranging – from the music of Tom Waits, to the works of Sir Quentin Blake; the history of the colour blue, to discussing what skills an actor needs to create a unique performance of Falstaff. Schama’s tastes are wide-ranging as they are eloquent, incisive, witty and thought provoking and have entertained and educated the readers of some of the world’s most respected publications - the Times, the Guardian, the New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar and Rolling Stone magazine.

Wordy is a celebration of one of the world’s foremost writers. This collection of fifty essays chosen by the man himself stretches across four decades and is a treasure trove for all those who have a passion for the arts, politics, food and life.
©2019 Simon Schama (P)2019 Simon & Schuster UK Art Politics & Government World Witty Thought-Provoking

Listeners also enjoyed...

 The Face of Britain cover art
Encounter cover art
Expletives Deleted cover art
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance cover art
Horizontal Vertigo cover art
The Peanuts Papers cover art
Haywire: The Best of Craig Brown cover art
Shaking a Leg cover art
On Writers and Writing cover art
The Years cover art
Red Memory cover art
Fierce Poise cover art
Uproar! cover art
All stars
Most relevant
Very spoiling to hear such beautiful language, fascinating clutch of gloriously eclectic and eccentric story telling.
Jessica

Wonderful Wordy-ness

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
After listening to Schama read Rough Crossings, I was looking forward to finding further histories of his in the audible archive but only found this. Right from the start I just could not work out what on earth he was talking about and why he could inject such passion into it. As t says on the cover - it's a sounding off. And as all such encounters with sounders off are - it's a big yawn.

sounding off is right

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.