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" 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. "

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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

" Northern Ireland must, in future, be absorbed into the Irish republic. Wales and Scotland must advance from devolution to full independent status. The four nations of these islands must commit themselves absolutely to the project of a United Europe. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" Only by painting the great panorama of history, can the great history-reading public be entertained or satisfied. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

Norman Davies

Scotland

English

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

Army

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