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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. "

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" 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. "

Norman Davies

Opinions

Tolerance

Squad

" So long as classical education and classical prejudices prevailed, educated Englishmen inevitably saw ancient Britain as an alien land. "

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

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

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

" Only by painting the great panorama of history, can the great history-reading public be entertained or satisfied. "

" The most noticeable thing about the Soviet collapse was that it followed a natural course. "

" Poland is the natural bridge between East and West. "

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

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

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

" Europe's fragmentation puts the wider historical picture beyond reach. "

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

" Poland was the racial laboratory of the Nazis. This is where they started to put their abhorrent theories into practice. "

" History is very much bound up in family experience. "

Norman Davies

Experience

Family

" 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. "

" Serenity is the balance between good and bad, life and death, horrors and pleasures. Life is, as it were, defined by death. If there wasn't death of things, then there wouldn't be any life to celebrate. "

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

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

" 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. "

" Any historian worth their salt should be aware of wars, conflicts, catastrophes. They happen. This is part of the panorama. "

" In the years of the Red Terror that followed the Bolshevik Revolution, the voice of dissent was stifled by universal denunciations, house searches, and preventive arrests. "

" None of Europe's modern nations are genuinely native. "

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

" 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.' "

" 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. "

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

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

Norman Davies

Scotland

English

" The Black Sea is Eastern Europe's counterpart to the Mediterranean. "

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