Quotes from Norman Davies

History must give the Poles the principal credit for bringing the Soviet bloc to its knees.

The last years of fading communism provided an ideal environment for Poland's Catholic Church, which acted as an umbrella for dissenters of all sorts.

The Law and Justice government does not want a bunch of foreign historians to decide what goes on in 'their' museum.

It's the historian's job not to ridicule the myths, but to show the difference between myth and reality.

None of Europe's modern nations are genuinely native.

Capacity of human societies both to absorb and to discard cultures is much underestimated.

It's our vanity that makes us think that what forms part of our world today must be stable and secure.

Nowadays, it is no longer possible to maintain that the Nazi-Soviet pact of 23 August 1939 was a fiction invented by bourgeois-imperialist enemies. Everyone has seen the film clips of Herr Ribbentrop landing in Moscow, and of Stalin smiling broadly as Ribbentrop and Molotov signed up side by side.

The advance of standard English culture was less assisted by government policy than by the sheer weight, wealth, and number of England's well-established cultural institutions.

The one certainly for anyone in the path of an avalanche is this: standing still is not an option.

Nothing stands still. Everything is moving in some direction or another.

According to whether one follows St Luke or St Matthew, the Christian Era began either in the last year of Herod the Great (4 BC) or in the year of the first Roman census in Judaea (AD 6–7).

The United Kingdom is nearing its end.

The United Kingdom is nearing its end. It begun to disintegrate with the departure of Ireland in 1922. I think the process will accelerate. We maybe setting on an avalanche, the surface is relatively calm but underneath pillars of Britishness have been seeping away.

wars can be traced to a scuffle between a man and a boy, both of whom summon aid to their respective sides.

Nothing better illustrated the realities of the Soviet collapse than the fate of Sergei Krikalyev, a Soviet cosmonaut who was fired into space in May 1991. He was still circling the earth at the end of the year for want of a decision to bring him back. He had left a Soviet Union that was still a superpower; he would return to a world from which the Soviet Union had disappeared. His controllers at the Baikonur Space Centre found themselves in the independent republic of Kazakhstan.

NB. Carlos III of Spain, Carlo I of Parma, Carlo VIII of Naples and Carlo V of Sicily were the same man.

The debased coinage of his reign bore his initials, ICR: Iohannes Casimirus Rex. These were taken to stand for Initium Calamitatum Reipublicae, the Beginning of the Republic's Catastrophes.

As from the 1490s, the double-headed eagle began to appear as the symbol of state in Moscow as in Vienna, as indeed in Constantinople.

Arguably, the only fruit of the Crusades kept by the Christians was the apricot.

Although the rival cereals of rye, barley,oats, buckwheat and millet have continued to exist in Europe, the triumphal march of king wheat was uncontestable

The difference between a referendum and a plebiscite is a fine one. Both pertain to collective decisions made by the direct vote of all qualified adults. The referendum, which derives from Swiss practice, involves an issue that is provisionally determined in advance, but that is then 'referred' for a final decision by the whole electorate. This

Also in 1492, and also for the first time, the 'new Constantinople—Moscow' may have been given its more familiar label of 'the Third Rome'.

Grain prices in France, for example, where the supply of coin was relatively scarce, were over seven times higher in 1600 than in 1500.