Norman Davies

“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.”

“So long as classical education and classical prejudices prevailed, educated Englishmen inevitably saw ancient Britain as an alien land.”

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

“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.”

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

“Myth-making is absolutely necessary to create the simplified images that people live off.”

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

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The one certainly for anyone in the path of an avalanche is this: standing still is not an option.”

“The Russian myths of the Second World War are still intact.”

“There is history in condoms, there is history in lampshades, there is history in everything.”

“The Law and Justice government does not want a bunch of foreign historians to decide what goes on in 'their' museum.”

“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.”

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

“One of the few things that can be said for certain about Europe's prehistoric peoples is that they all came from somewhere else.”

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

“Each side tries to legitimize their aims by appealing to history, sometimes selectively choosing episodes and other times just by inventing history.”