Quotes from Norman Davies

The question is whether a confident Europe will be a rival for North America - or whether they will work together and become a more unified bloc.

I find myself sick to death, tired of arguing about details with people who don't know basic facts.

The historical profession is nowhere famous for its tolerance, but there are not many countries where historians can expect to pay for their opinions with penal servitude or the firing squad.

In the 21st century, there will probably be a reflex against the disintegration of traditional European culture. What started as a reaction will come full circle, and there will be a return to the roots.

Transience is one of the fundamental characteristics both of the human condition and of the political order.

The Russian myths of the Second World War are still intact.

The E.U. is an organization that was created after the Second World War for calming down the nationalism of member states, and it did so very successfully.

Fifty years would seem to be time enough to prepare a definitive history of the Second World War. In an age of instant data-gathering, one might think that the historians could have arrived at a consensus for interpreting the main events of the war. In reality, no such consensus exists.

In 1945, when the Second World War technically ends in Poland, the incoming Soviet army liberates some groups of people but begins to oppress the general population, in some ways more harshly than it had happened before.

Why are some things remembered and others forgotten? That is the theme I want to pursue about the Second World War.

All states and nations, however great, bloom for a season and are replaced.

The shores of the Black Sea lend themselves to the literary genre that may be classified as 'cultural pilgrimage,' which is not just a higher form of travel writing but which has the further mission of reporting on present conditions and supplying neglected knowledge.

Myth-making is absolutely necessary to create the simplified images that people live off.

Traditionally, historians thought in terms of invasions: the Celts took over the islands, then the Romans, then the Anglo-Saxons. It now seems much more likely that the resident population doesn't change as much as thought. The people stay put but are reculturalized by some new dominant culture.

For people familiar with Eastern Europe, Marci Shore's 'The Taste of Ashes' is, in spite of its subject matter, delicious. A professor at Yale with much experience in Eastern Europe, she writes with great sureness of touch, weaving personal recollections with intellectual commentary and ideas with emotions, including her own.

I first came across the Anders Army story by accident. When I first went to live in Oxford in the 1960s, I discovered that some of my close neighbours had been on the Anders trail.

Bulgaria was the only Axis country to deflect insistent German demands for the deportation of its Jews.

I first heard of General Anders and his army more than 50 years ago. I admired him then, and I admire him still; and I feel a special bond with the men, women and children whom he rescued from hunger, disease, and official abuse. Theirs is a story of endurance and fortitude that gives one faith in the human spirit.

People don't see very often their death coming... Look at the French Revolution: The king of France was thinking in the 1780s, 'We're doing rather better than my father in the 1770s.'

Each side tries to legitimize their aims by appealing to history, sometimes selectively choosing episodes and other times just by inventing history.

At the end of the Roman Empire, in the Byzantine period, the empire shrinks and shrinks until it consists of one city, Constantinople, and the Ottoman Turks can encircle it.

One of the few things that can be said for certain about Europe's prehistoric peoples is that they all came from somewhere else.

All political institutions will end sooner or later. The question is when and how.

It was in the 20th century that national sovereignty really ruled the roost, and the E.U. was formed to cure that.