Norman Davies
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.

Norman Davies
Norman Davies

Bulgaria was the only Axis country to deflect insistent German demands for the deportation of its Jews.

Norman Davies
Norman Davies

Any historian worth their salt should be aware of wars, conflicts, catastrophes. They happen. This is part of the panorama.

Norman Davies
Norman Davies

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.

Norman Davies
Norman Davies

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.

Norman Davies
Norman Davies

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.

Norman Davies
Norman Davies

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.

Norman Davies
Norman Davies

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.

Norman Davies
Norman Davies

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

Norman Davies
Norman Davies

History is very much bound up in family experience.

Norman Davies
Norman Davies

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

Norman Davies
Norman Davies

Nothing stands still. Everything is moving in some direction or another.

Norman Davies
Norman Davies

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.

Norman Davies
Norman Davies

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

Norman Davies
Norman Davies

History must give the Poles the principal credit for bringing the Soviet bloc to its knees.

Norman Davies
Norman Davies

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.

Norman Davies
Norman Davies

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.

Norman Davies
Norman Davies

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.

Norman Davies
Norman Davies

Only by painting the great panorama of history, can the great history-reading public be entertained or satisfied.

Norman Davies
Norman Davies

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