The 'politics of memory' policy appears to work largely by insinuation.
— Norman Davies
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.
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.
In the long run, Europe will certainly move toward unification. But it will be a process of push and pull, and there will be resistance.
History is very much bound up in family experience.
I do belong to the club which doesn't see a distinction between academic history and popular history.
The Euro Sceptics are the English National Party in disguise, and they have poor old David Cameron over a barrel.
It is important to remember that John Paul II was not an American or a Frenchman.
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.
Law and Justice are the most vindictive gang in Europe.
So long as classical education and classical prejudices prevailed, educated Englishmen inevitably saw ancient Britain as an alien land.
Nothing stands still. Everything is moving in some direction or another.
Poland is the natural bridge between East and West.
Only by painting the great panorama of history, can the great history-reading public be entertained or satisfied.
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.
There is a real danger of the United Kingdom breaking up. There is a loss of common identity.
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.
It's the historian's job not to ridicule the myths, but to show the difference between myth and reality.
The Law and Justice government does not want a bunch of foreign historians to decide what goes on in 'their' museum.
It was in the 20th century that national sovereignty really ruled the roost, and the E.U. was formed to cure that.
Each side tries to legitimize their aims by appealing to history, sometimes selectively choosing episodes and other times just by inventing history.
History must give the Poles the principal credit for bringing the Soviet bloc to its knees.
I don't see why a book shouldn't be intellectually sound, entertaining, and fun to read. Historians who write academic history, which is unreadable, are basically wasting their time.
Every austerity measure that Cameron and George Osborne make is being presented in Scotland as the English starving us.
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.
The Russian myths of the Second World War are still intact.
Myth-making is absolutely necessary to create the simplified images that people live off.
