Forgetful he may be, but Simon Schama knows how to make it up to a waiting journalist.
Bursting into the cafe near his London home an hour late, he dashes up to every customer in the place and asks each in turn if they happen to be called James. When Schama eventually makes it to my table he thrusts a bunch of daffodils into my hand, expresses his mortification at forgetting our appointment, explains he has builders fixing his roof, adds that he has just been hit by jet lag and orders breakfast - all in one elegant torrent of a sentence.
This sets the pace for the conversation. Anyone who has watched Schama on A History of Britain, Power of Art and The American Future: A History will know him as a man of eloquence, energy and passion - an intellectual with range and real panache.
The camera does not lie. Schama in person is every bit as kinetic as on the screen. Popping pieces of bagel into his mouth with one hand and sloshing a cup of coffee around with the other, he tears into topic after topic, mixing frothy gossip, high-minded erudition and grandiloquent exposition. Topics fizz by in minutes. There is a pithy treatise on the glories of baseball ('A serious passion of mine') which meanders into a digression about Paulie, Schama's Tamil Nadu fishmonger in New York, and his futile attempts to explain cricket to Paulie's American partner, Joe.
Zipping sideways, Schama lands on two other serious passions: painting and television. He's in London to give a talk at the National Gallery about the art history films of Kenneth Clarke and John Berger.
From there, it's a hop, skip and a jump over Damien Hirst ('A very serious, encyclopaedic-minded boy'), past Franz Klein, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and on to Schama's latest BBC documentary - about the 17th-century poet and preacher, John Donne. Schama hopes the film will do for literature what his previous television series did for history: after A History of Britain was broadcast in Britain, applications to study history went through the roof and history books outsold cookery books for the first time in decades.
