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" 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. "

Norman Davies

Red

Dissent

House

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

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

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

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

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

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

" I can just remember the blitz of Manchester, or perhaps my father's tales about the blitz of Manchester. I can remember the blackout, the powdered eggs, and the gas masks. But I think no British person should pretend that being resident in England could count as being in the thick of the action. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" The 'politics of memory' policy appears to work largely by insinuation. "

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

" 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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" 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.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" At the end of the Roman Empire, in the Byzantine period, the empire shrinks and shrinks until it consists of one city, Constantinople, and the Ottoman Turks can encircle it. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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Norman Davies

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

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Everything

History