The Euro Sceptics are the English National Party in disguise, and they have poor old David Cameron over a barrel.
The Black Sea is Eastern Europe's counterpart to the Mediterranean.
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.
In essence, the tragedy of the Warsaw Rising resulted from a systemic breakdown of the Grand Alliance.
The one certainly for anyone in the path of an avalanche is this: standing still is not an option.
The Law and Justice government does not want a bunch of foreign historians to decide what goes on in 'their' museum.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
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 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.
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.
There is a real danger of the United Kingdom breaking up. There is a loss of common identity.
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.
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.
Winners of wars get a standing start in the post-war stakes of remembrance.
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.
