Quotes from Antony Beevor

He then 'went off to have a rest', which was often a Soviet euphemism for incapacity through alcohol.

Nothing, however, stopped the conquerors' resolution to crush every aspect of Basque nationalism. The Basque flag, the ikurriña, was outlawed and use of the Basque language suppressed. Threatening notices were displayed: 'If you are Spanish, speak Spanish.' Regionalist feelings in any form were portrayed as the cancer of the Spanish body politic.

Two other axes of conflict emerged: state centralism against regional independence and authoritarianism against the freedom of the individual. The

Russians in Kiev never expected the Ukrainian forces to put up much of a fight. Deliberately ignoring the reality of Ukrainian culture and history, they had taken Ukrainian patriotism as little more than a joke.

There was a pump which still worked outside the station, and young women near the entrance took the risk of running with a pail to fetch water.

The panzergrenadiers were very nonchalant and 'elegant'. They asked their prisoners what they would like to drink, milk or wine.

Castile had the unbending pride of a newly impoverished nobleman, who refuses to notice the cobwebs and decay in his great house and resolutely continues to visualize the grandeur of his youth. This capacity for seeing only what it wanted to see made the Castilian ruling order introverted. It refused to see that the treasures from the Americas in the churches fed nobody and that the vast quantities of precious but useless metal only undermined the country's economic infrastructure.

The nationalists justified the brutality of their repression as reprisals for the red terror, but as had been the case in Seville, Córdoba and in Badajoz, and as would be the case in Málaga six months later, the subsequent nationalist killings exceeded those of the left several, if not many, times over.

Meanwhile the 7th Armoured Division had charged ahead to cut off Tobruk. Two Australian brigades hurried on from Bardia to complete the siege. Tobruk also surrendered, offering up another 25,000 prisoners, 208 guns, eighty-seven armoured vehicles and fourteen Italian army prostitutes who were sent back to a convent in Alexandria where they languished miserably for the rest of the war.

several historians have emphasized, the country which had so desired law and order in 1933 ended up with one of the most criminal and irresponsible regimes in history. The result was that its own people, above all the women and children of East Prussia, faced

It should not be forgotten that 600 Soviet prisoners of war were gassed in Auschwitz on 3 September 1941. This was the first experiment there with Zyklon B.

In 1970, the Kremlin finally decided to dispose of the body in absolute secrecy. The funeral rites of the Third Reich's leader were indeed macabre. Hitler's jaws, kept so carefully in the red box by Rzhevskaya during the victory celebrations in Berlin, had been retained by SMERSH, while the NKVD kept the cranium.

All too often guilt was a matter of timing. Y. S., who ran away when her village was bombed, was sentenced to six months' labour camp 'for deserting her place of work', while A. S., who refused to leave her home when the Germans were approaching, was condemned in absentia as a 'traitor to the Motherland'. A minimum of ten years in a Gulag labour camp awaited her.

A small girl among those being evacuated to Sorinnes had lost her shoes, so an American soldier from the 82nd Reconnaissance Battalion forced a German prisoner at gunpoint to take off his boots and give them to her. They were much too large, but she was just able to walk, while the German soldier faced frostbitten feet.

began to scream and yell. The SS was betraying him now as well as the army. This rage was far worse than any of his rows with Guderian. Eventually he collapsed into an armchair, drained and weeping.

Torgau on the Elbe, leading elements of Major General Vladimir Rusakov's 58th Guards Rifle Division met up with US soldiers from the 69th Division.

Waffen-SS prisoners were conspicuous by their rarity, either because of their determination to go down fighting, or from being shot on sight by their captors. One

but the outcome of the battle depended on nerve as much as resources.

It takes me three or four years to research and write each book and the individual stories stay with you for a long time afterwards.

I am not someone who believes I am going to find a historical scoop.

The blurring of fact and fiction has great commercial potential, which is bound to be corrupting in historical terms.

School-leavers unfortunately will come away thinking the First World War consisted simply of 'going over the top' on the Western Front to slaughter in no-man's-land, when the conflict extended so much further, to the collapse of four empires and numerous civil wars.

The memory of the Second World War hangs over Europe, an inescapable and irresistible point of reference. Historical parallels are usually misleading and dangerous.

When we dwell on the enormity of the Second World War and its victims, we try to absorb all those statistics of national and ethnic tragedy. But, as a result, there is a tendency to overlook the way the war changed even the survivors' lives in ways impossible to predict.