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

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

" 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 Russian myths of the Second World War are still intact. "

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

" 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. "

" Young people have to learn in a cocoon filled with false optimism. Unlike their parents and grandparents, they grow up with very little sense of the pitiless passage of time. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" Under Lenin, hardly less than under Stalin, historians harbored critical opinions at their peril. The writing, let alone the publication, of political diaries was virtually impossible. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

" Why does a state last a thousand years? Why not 999? Why not a thousand and one? What are the events that finally bring the whole thing down? That is what I am asking. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" It's unimaginable to meet a Pole or a German who does not know about the history of their country. But lots of English people don't know the difference between Britain and England. "

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

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

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