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" 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. "

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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. "

Norman Davies

Everyone

Film

Side

" Capacity of human societies both to absorb and to discard cultures is much underestimated. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Nearly all interested parties think I write too shortly on the subjects that interest them most. "

" 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. "

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

" A bad historian is even more dangerous than dead documentary wood. "

" 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.' "

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

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

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

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

" 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

" There is history in condoms, there is history in lampshades, there is history in everything. "

Norman Davies

Everything

History

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

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

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

Norman Davies

Scotland

English

" In essence, the tragedy of the Warsaw Rising resulted from a systemic breakdown of the Grand Alliance. "

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

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