SIMON SCHAMA’S HISTORY OF NOW

BBC Two, 9.30pm

Simon Schama’s winningly idiosyncratic,

argumentative and perceptive overview of the second half of the last century turns to the civil rights struggle through Nina Simone’s thrilling, shocking Mississippi Goddam and James Baldwin’s Cambridge Union debate with William Buckley, alongside the battles to overturn misogyny and homophobia through David Hockney and Margaret Atwood. Advances have been hard won but remain perilously fragile.