Simon Schama: Interviewed by the Guardian

"The way history is currently taught in schools jumping from Hitler to the Henrys," says British historian Simon Schama, "is like a nightmare vision of Star Wars, where you have episode four before you have episode one. The sense of going on a journey, of chronology and continuity, is incredibly important to the imagination."

It was a terrible, tortured decision for me whether to read English or history. I should have gone to Harvard or somewhere you could do history and literature. A lot of my writing since has been an attempt to do a kind of history which has (possibly pathetically deluded) ambitions to be a kind of non-fiction literature.

We're all wired to have curiosity about our ancestry. I'm not even sure I believe in the finished identity, but wilfully to perpetrate collective memory loss seems to me to get you into trouble.

After I was hired at Oxford, I discovered all the historians in the college had voted against me. I once got up at a faculty meeting and proposed a course on family history and it was as though I'd farted. It was pretty much impossible to teach your enthusiasms.

You impoverish your understanding of what a human being is if you don't examine your past. Would one have known about brutality, cruelty, courage, virtue, self-sacrifice, cynicism without history? Yes, but observing it in one's contemporaries is a less reliable, ultimately more shallow source than observing over centuries.

I believed the intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. And unlike John Kerry or Tony Blair, if asked whether I'd have supported the war knowing what we know now, I would instantaneously say, 'Of course not.' I thought we were acting pragmatically and prudentially to stop those weapons being used, ever. There is horror in being disabused of that belief.

Novelist friends sometimes say to me, 'Just stop it, write the novel.' But I'm very conscious of the clown who wanted to play Hamlet. I had really good advice from a novelist friend who said, 'Absolutely do it, but don't tell anyone, don't take an advance. Then if it's crap no one need ever know.' So if I ever do it, that's what I'll do.

In America, much of foreign policy seems contrived to be an exercise in political theory with no attention to history whatsoever. Yet there's great reverence for history - though it's history as thumb-sucking, security-blanket-nibbling self-congratulation.

If you have any time at all, always bother to make your own chicken stock.