Europe's fragmentation puts the wider historical picture beyond reach.
— Norman Davies
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.
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.
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.
In essence, the tragedy of the Warsaw Rising resulted from a systemic breakdown of the Grand Alliance.
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.
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.
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.
One of the few things that can be said for certain about Europe's prehistoric peoples is that they all came from somewhere else.
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.
There is history in condoms, there is history in lampshades, there is history in everything.
A bad historian is even more dangerous than dead documentary wood.
Winners of wars get a standing start in the post-war stakes of remembrance.
Poland was the racial laboratory of the Nazis. This is where they started to put their abhorrent theories into practice.
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.'
Our mental maps are distorted by who are the 'winners' of history and who are the powers of today.
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.
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.
The one certainly for anyone in the path of an avalanche is this: standing still is not an option.
The question is whether a confident Europe will be a rival for North America - or whether they will work together and become a more unified bloc.
Capacity of human societies both to absorb and to discard cultures is much underestimated.
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.
Why are some things remembered and others forgotten? That is the theme I want to pursue about the Second World War.
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.
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.
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.
Nearly all interested parties think I write too shortly on the subjects that interest them most.
Bulgaria was the only Axis country to deflect insistent German demands for the deportation of its Jews.
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.
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.
All states and nations, however great, bloom for a season and are replaced.
It's our vanity that makes us think that what forms part of our world today must be stable and secure.
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.
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.
The United Kingdom is not, and never has been, a nation state.
Transience is one of the fundamental characteristics both of the human condition and of the political order.
The Black Sea is Eastern Europe's counterpart to the Mediterranean.
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 historical profession is nowhere famous for its tolerance, but there are not many countries where historians can expect to pay for their opinions with penal servitude or the firing squad.
None of Europe's modern nations are genuinely native.
The most noticeable thing about the Soviet collapse was that it followed a natural course.
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.
I find myself sick to death, tired of arguing about details with people who don't know basic facts.
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.
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.
Any historian worth their salt should be aware of wars, conflicts, catastrophes. They happen. This is part of the panorama.
The idea that historians write the definitive version of something that will last for all time is less current than it used to be.
All political institutions will end sooner or later. The question is when and how.
