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" It's the historian's job not to ridicule the myths, but to show the difference between myth and reality. "
Norman Davies
Job
Difference
Myths
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
Norman Davies
Organization
World
Second
" 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. "
Norman Davies
Empire
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" History is very much bound up in family experience. "
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Up
Experience
Family
" 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
" Historical change is like an avalanche. The starting point is a snow-covered mountainside that looks solid. All changes take place under the surface and are rather invisible. "
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Change
Invisible
Looks
" The Black Sea is Eastern Europe's counterpart to the Mediterranean. "
Norman Davies
Europe
Sea
Black
" 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. "
Norman Davies
Church
Last
Environment
" Why are some things remembered and others forgotten? That is the theme I want to pursue about the Second World War. "
Norman Davies
Why
World
Theme
" There is a real danger of the United Kingdom breaking up. There is a loss of common identity. "
Norman Davies
Danger
Identity
Kingdom
" It was in the 20th century that national sovereignty really ruled the roost, and the E.U. was formed to cure that. "
Norman Davies
Cure
Sovereignty
Really
" Poland in the 1990s saw a surge of unrestrained, American-style capitalism. With millions of Poles living in the U.S.A., the defeat of communism led many to aim for a lifestyle derivative of Chicago or Detroit. "
Norman Davies
Capitalism
Communism
Defeat
" 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. "
Norman Davies
Hope
Diversity
Death
" 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
See
Book
Time
" Bulgaria was the only Axis country to deflect insistent German demands for the deportation of its Jews. "
Norman Davies
Jews
Country
Deportation
" 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. "
Norman Davies
World
History
Think
" I always needle a bit when people say I'm a champion of the Poles, because I've always had a very multinational view of Poland. "
Norman Davies
Had
Say
View
" In essence, the tragedy of the Warsaw Rising resulted from a systemic breakdown of the Grand Alliance. "
Norman Davies
Essence
Alliance
Rising
" I first heard of General Anders and his army more than 50 years ago. I admired him then, and I admire him still; and I feel a special bond with the men, women and children whom he rescued from hunger, disease, and official abuse. Theirs is a story of endurance and fortitude that gives one faith in the human spirit. "
Norman Davies
Women
Children
Endurance
" The Law and Justice government does not want a bunch of foreign historians to decide what goes on in 'their' museum. "
Norman Davies
Government
Museum
Justice
" One of the few things that can be said for certain about Europe's prehistoric peoples is that they all came from somewhere else. "
Norman Davies
Few
Europe
Things
" Nearly all interested parties think I write too shortly on the subjects that interest them most. "
Norman Davies
Think
Interest
Write
" The idea that historians write the definitive version of something that will last for all time is less current than it used to be. "
Norman Davies
Will
Last
Something
" Law and Justice are the most vindictive gang in Europe. "
Norman Davies
Europe
Most
Law
" 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. "
Norman Davies
Everyone
Film
Side
" Capacity of human societies both to absorb and to discard cultures is much underestimated. "
Norman Davies
Human
Much
Absorb
" 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. "
Norman Davies
Anything
Life
Change
" In 1945, when the Second World War technically ends in Poland, the incoming Soviet army liberates some groups of people but begins to oppress the general population, in some ways more harshly than it had happened before. "
Norman Davies
World
More
Army
" So long as classical education and classical prejudices prevailed, educated Englishmen inevitably saw ancient Britain as an alien land. "
Norman Davies
Alien
Educated
Education
" I do belong to the club which doesn't see a distinction between academic history and popular history. "
Norman Davies
Club
See
Academic