The appointment of historian and presenter Simon Schama as the Coalition Government's new history tsar has been condemned as insincere and insulting by a leading academic.

Prof Mary Beard, classics professor at Cambridge University, described the announcement as an example of Michael Gove, the education secretary, "playing to the populist gallery".

She described the idea that a celebrity could be "parachuted" in to solve problems as insulting to British teachers and as an insincere stunt to grab attention.

"This is celebrity culture at its most meretricious," she said....