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" Traditionally, historians thought in terms of invasions: the Celts took over the islands, then the Romans, then the Anglo-Saxons. It now seems much more likely that the resident population doesn't change as much as thought. The people stay put but are reculturalized by some new dominant culture. "

Norman Davies

People

Change

Culture

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" It was in the 20th century that national sovereignty really ruled the roost, and the E.U. was formed to cure that. "

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

Norman Davies

Experience

Family

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

" 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. "

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

Norman Davies

Scotland

English

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" Bulgaria was the only Axis country to deflect insistent German demands for the deportation of its Jews. "

" 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. "

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

" The Euro Sceptics are the English National Party in disguise, and they have poor old David Cameron over a barrel. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" I first came across the Anders Army story by accident. When I first went to live in Oxford in the 1960s, I discovered that some of my close neighbours had been on the Anders trail. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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