A biography for Norman Davieshasn’t been written yet.
“I find myself sick to death, tired of arguing about details with people who don't know basic facts.”
“Transience is one of the fundamental characteristics both of the human condition and of the political order.”
“Law and Justice are the most vindictive gang in Europe.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Bulgaria was the only Axis country to deflect insistent German demands for the deportation of its Jews.”
“History is very much bound up in family experience.”
“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.'”
“The Euro Sceptics are the English National Party in disguise, and they have poor old David Cameron over a barrel.”
“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.”
“There is a real danger of the United Kingdom breaking up. There is a loss of common identity.”
“The United Kingdom is not, and never has been, a nation state.”
“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 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 states and nations, however great, bloom for a season and are replaced.”
“The Black Sea is Eastern Europe's counterpart to the Mediterranean.”
“Europe's fragmentation puts the wider historical picture beyond reach.”
“The idea that historians write the definitive version of something that will last for all time is less current than it used to be.”
“Nearly all interested parties think I write too shortly on the subjects that interest them most.”
“The 'politics of memory' policy appears to work largely by insinuation.”