Quotes from Norman Davies

Discord among the ex-Soviet nationalities was fuelling an ugly brand of Russian nationalism. Voices in Moscow called for the re-conquest of Russia's 'near abroad'. For after Abkhazia, there waited several further targets for Russian intervention, including Tatarstan and Chechenia, and other non-Russian lands within the Russian Federation. Sooner or later, Russia would be forced to choose between its new-style democracy and its old-style imperialism.

For more than five hundred years the cardinal problem in defining Europe has centred on the inclusion or exclusion of Russia.

It was at 'The Little Lodge' I was first menaced with Education. The approach of a sinister figure described as 'the Governess' was announced … Mrs Everest produced a book called Reading without Tears. It certainly did not justify its title in my case … [When] the Governess was due to arrive, I did what so many oppressed peoples have done in similar circumstances: I took to the woods. I

The city of Florence stood in the centre of the squalls and sun-shafts of late medieval Italy. Nurtured on the wool of its beautiful Apennine contado, it grew in the thirteenth century into a thriving community of perhaps 100,000 turbulent souls. Its gold coin, the florin, became standard currency far beyond Italy.

By the seventeenth century the thaler had become a unit of currency all over central Europe. It had also been copied in Habsburg Spain, whose taleros or 'pieces of eight' circulated throughout the Americas. They were known in English as 'dollars'.

Contrary to some expectations. Europe's brush with modern power revived its Christian culture. The 'Railway Age' was also the age of muscular Christianity.

There are shades of barbarism in twentieth-century Europe which would once have amazed the most barbarous of barbarians. At a time when the instruments of constructive change had outstripped anything previously known, Europeans acquiesced in a string of conflicts which destroyed more human beings than all past convulsions put together.

Maria Theresa dollar of 1751.

The formula Muscovy + Ukraine = Russia does not feature in the Russians' own version of their history; but it is fundamental.

Extensive coin hoards, two from eighth-century Central Asia, showed that Novgorod's far-flung trading contacts had never been seriously interrupted, even by the Mongol invasions. [DIRHAM]

And now I say unto Thee, take care and take heed, pious Tsar: all the empires of Christendom are united in thine. For two Romes have fallen, and the Third exists; and there will not be a fourth.

They [combatants in the Thirty Years' War] wanted peace and they fought for thirty years to be sure of it. They did not learn then, and have not learned since, that war only breeds war.

In the long run, Europe will certainly move toward unification. But it will be a process of push and pull, and there will be resistance.

It's unimaginable to meet a Pole or a German who does not know about the history of their country. But lots of English people don't know the difference between Britain and England.

There is a real danger of the United Kingdom breaking up. There is a loss of common identity.

I happen to belong to that group opinion which holds the break-up of the United Kingdom to be imminent.

The United Kingdom is not, and never has been, a nation state.

Every austerity measure that Cameron and George Osborne make is being presented in Scotland as the English starving us.

Young people have to learn in a cocoon filled with false optimism. Unlike their parents and grandparents, they grow up with very little sense of the pitiless passage of time.

States seem to have a natural life cycle, and anything can occur to change them into something else, and that something might be no bad thing.

[The Poles] will die for their country; but few will work for it.

I wanted to produce a book that would demonstrate not only the rich diversity of people who answered to Anders's command but also the extraordinary variety of their experiences and emotions: from death to despair, fear and longings and eventually to hope.

One of the problems in the Ukrainian crisis is that very few Westerners know their history, or if they know it, what they learn is what we call the Russian version of history.

Nearly all interested parties think I write too shortly on the subjects that interest them most.