Bulgaria was the only Axis country to deflect insistent German demands for the deportation of its Jews.
Norman Davies
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.
There is a real danger of the United Kingdom breaking up. There is a loss of common identity.
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 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.
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.
Nothing stands still. Everything is moving in some direction or another.
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.
In essence, the tragedy of the Warsaw Rising resulted from a systemic breakdown of the Grand Alliance.
The idea that historians write the definitive version of something that will last for all time is less current than it used to be.
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.
Capacity of human societies both to absorb and to discard cultures is much underestimated.
Our mental maps are distorted by who are the 'winners' of history and who are the powers of today.
History must give the Poles the principal credit for bringing the Soviet bloc to its knees.
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.
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.
So long as classical education and classical prejudices prevailed, educated Englishmen inevitably saw ancient Britain as an alien land.
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 political institutions will end sooner or later. The question is when and how.
The one certainly for anyone in the path of an avalanche is this: standing still is not an option.
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.
The Black Sea is Eastern Europe's counterpart to the Mediterranean.
There is history in condoms, there is history in lampshades, there is history in everything.
Any historian worth their salt should be aware of wars, conflicts, catastrophes. They happen. This is part of the panorama.
The Russian myths of the Second World War are still intact.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Transience is one of the fundamental characteristics both of the human condition and of the political order.
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.'
Europe's fragmentation puts the wider historical picture beyond reach.
All states and nations, however great, bloom for a season and are replaced.
The most noticeable thing about the Soviet collapse was that it followed a natural course.
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.
History is very much bound up in family experience.
I find myself sick to death, tired of arguing about details with people who don't know basic facts.
Poland was the racial laboratory of the Nazis. This is where they started to put their abhorrent theories into practice.
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.
The Law and Justice government does not want a bunch of foreign historians to decide what goes on in 'their' museum.
The Euro Sceptics are the English National Party in disguise, and they have poor old David Cameron over a barrel.
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.
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.
Only by painting the great panorama of history, can the great history-reading public be entertained or satisfied.
Winners of wars get a standing start in the post-war stakes of remembrance.
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.
It's the historian's job not to ridicule the myths, but to show the difference between myth and reality.
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.
Myth-making is absolutely necessary to create the simplified images that people live off.
