A biography for Antony Beevorhasn’t been written yet.
“I love 'Blackadder,' but history it certainly ain't.”
“I just love the days when you come out of the archives with half a dozen excellent descriptions or poignant accounts of personal experiences.”
“I can't envisage stopping writing.”
“A blend of fact and fiction has been used in various forms since the dawn of creative writing, starting with sagas and epic poems.”
“I was planning to stay in the Army all my life, but I ended up being posted to a training camp in Wales and was so bored there, I wrote a novel.”
“It takes me three or four years to research and write each book and the individual stories stay with you for a long time afterwards.”
“I'm often reassured in a bizarre - perhaps perverse - way when I find in the archive stuff that contradicts what my assumptions have been. That's interesting and exciting.”
“The majority of soldiers and officers of the Soviet Army and the allied armies treated the local population humanely.”
“I just write the sort of book that I would enjoy reading myself, a book that is both scholarly and recreates the experience of people at that time.”
“Of course history is easily manipulated - though that makes it even more important for us to know what actually happened.”
“I have come across both inspiring teachers of history and deplorable ones over the years, so one cannot generalise, except perhaps to observe that the profession seems to encourage anti-militarist sentiments.”
“If you smash a city when you're trying to capture it, you actually end up providing the perfect terrain for the defenders while blocking the access for your own armoured vehicles.”
“To begin impatiently is the worst mistake a writer can make.”
“Teaching the history of the British Empire links in with that of the world: for better and for worse, the Empire made us what we are, forming our national identity. A country that does not understand its own history is unlikely to respect that of others.”
“In the Iraq war, for instance, so much of the information is digitized and can easily be wiped out. That will make it very hard to write accurate histories. Also, there's a much greater opportunity for suppression of information before it can even be archived.”
“The greatest heroes of the Normandy battlefield were the unarmed medics, whom snipers often shot at despite their Red Cross armbands.”
“I joined the Army in 1965 and served with the 11th Hussars, which I loved. The regiment was so relaxed - a salute was more like a friendly wave.”
“Politicians are often tempted to deploy history as a weapon against each other.”
“It is this compulsion to look backwards at a time of crisis because one's got no idea of what lies ahead. There is a notion of security that somehow it must resemble the past. It's never going to. Just because we muddled through in the past doesn't mean we can automatically muddle through in the future.”
“The memory of the Second World War hangs over Europe, an inescapable and irresistible point of reference. Historical parallels are usually misleading and dangerous.”