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" I don't see why a book shouldn't be intellectually sound, entertaining, and fun to read. Historians who write academic history, which is unreadable, are basically wasting their time. "

Norman Davies

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Book

Time

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Norman Davies

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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

" Our mental maps are distorted by who are the 'winners' of history and who are the powers of today. "

" Law and Justice are the most vindictive gang in Europe. "

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

" One might have thought that 70 years was time enough to work out what really happened in 1939. It isn't the case. Misunderstandings and misinformation abound. "

" 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. "

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" 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. "

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

" The idea that historians write the definitive version of something that will last for all time is less current than it used to be. "

" 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. "

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" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

Norman Davies

Secure

Vanity

" 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. "

" I do belong to the club which doesn't see a distinction between academic history and popular history. "

" It is important to remember that John Paul II was not an American or a Frenchman. "

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