Norman Davies

Norman Davies

Ivor Norman Richard Davies CMG FBA FRHistS (born 8 June 1939) is a British and Polish historian, known for his publications on the history of Europe, Poland and the United Kingdom. He has a special interest in Central and Eastern Europe and is UNESCO Professor at the Jagiellonian University, professor emeritus at University College London, a visiting professor at the Collège d'Europe, and an honorary fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford.

Quotes

• If enough people in society can be convinced that history is governed by scientific laws: that Soviet-style Socialism is the inevitable product of historical progress: and that the Soviet Union embodies all the finest socialist ideals of peace, equality, and justice, then rational people should be incapable of defying the rule of the Soviet government and its chosen allies.
  • Heart of Europe: A Short History of Poland (New York: Oxford UP, 1984), ch. 1 (p. 37)

• When Henryk Sienkiewicz set Poland alight with his tales of chivalry, it was Cossack life in 17th-century Poland that stirred his readers. Just as many great 'Englishmen' turn out to be Irishmen or Scots, so many great 'Poles', like Mickiewicz, Słowacki, or Kościuszko, turn out to be Lithuanians.
  • White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish-Soviet War, 1919–20 (Pimlico, 2003 [1972]), ch. 1 (p. 29)

• Historical knowledge does not need artificial protection. ... The truth about the past can only be established and strengthened by the clash of wisdom and absurdity. If absurdity is banned by the law, wisdom too is diminished.
  • Europe at War, 1939–1945: No Simple Victory (Macmillan, 2006), ch. 7 (p. 489)

Europe: A History (1996)

New York: Oxford UP

• For more than five hundred years the cardinal problem in defining Europe has centred on the inclusion or exclusion of Russia.
  • Introduction (p. 10)

• Reconstructing the past is rather like translating poetry. It can be done, but never exactly. Whether one deals with prehistoric recipes, colonial settlements, or medieval music, it needs great imagination and restraint if the twin perils of artless authenticity and clueless empathy are to be avoided.
  • Ch. 1: Peninsula (p. 83)

• Arguably, the only fruit of the Crusades kept by the Christians was the apricot.
  • Ch. 5: Medium (p. 358)

• Theorists of propaganda have identified five basic rules:
  1. The rule of simplification: reducing all data to a simple confrontation between 'Good and Bad', 'Friend and Foe'.
  2. The rule of disfiguration: discrediting the opposition by crude smears and parodies.
  3. The rule of transfusion: manipulating the consensus values of the target audience for one's own ends.
  4. The rule of unanimity: presenting one's viewpoint as if it were the unanimous opinion of all right-thinking people: drawing the doubting individual into agreement by the appeal of star-performers, by social pressure, and by 'psychological contagion'.
  5. The rule of orchestration: endlessly repeating the same messages in different variations and combinations.
  • Ch. 7: Renatio (p. 500)

• It is indeed the duty of historians to stress the contrast between the standards of the past and the standards of the present. Some fulfil that duty on purpose, others by accident.
  • Ch. 7: Renatio (p. 509)

• The debased coinage of his reign bore his initials, ICR: Iohannes Casimirus Rex. These were taken to stand for Initium Calamitatum Reipublicae, the Beginning of the Republic's Catastrophes.
  • Ch. 7: Renatio (p. 556)

• The formula Muscovy + Ukraine = Russia does not feature in the Russians’ own version of their history; but it is fundamental.
  • Ch. 7: Renatio (p. 558)

• They wanted peace and they fought for thirty years to be sure of it. They did not learn then, and have not learned since, that war only breeds war.
  • Ch. 7: Renatio (p. 563)

• Contrary to some expectations, Europe's brush with modern power revived its Christian culture. The 'Railway Age' was also the age of muscular Christianity.
  • Ch. 10: Dynamo (p. 760)

• There are shades of barbarism in twentieth-century Europe which would once have amazed the most barbarous of barbarians. At a time when the instruments of constructive change had outstripped anything previously known, Europeans acquiesced in a string of conflicts which destroyed more human beings than all past convulsions put together.
  • Ch. 11: Tenebrae (p. 897)

• The most obvious fact of the Soviet collapse is that it happened through natural causes. The Soviet Union was not, like ancient Rome, invaded by barbarians or, like the Polish Commonwealth, partitioned by rapacious neighbours, or, like the Habsburg Empire, overwhelmed by the strains of a great war. It was not, like the Nazi Reich, defeated in a fight to the death. It died because it had to, because the grotesque organs of its internal structure were incapable of providing the essentials of life. In a nuclear age, it could not, like its tsarist predecessor, solve its internal problems by expansion. Nor could it suck more benefit from the nations whom it had captured. It could not tolerate the partnership with China which once promised a global future for communism; it could not stand the oxygen of reform; so it imploded. It was struck down by the political equivalent of a coronary, more massive than anything that history affords.
  • Ch. 12: Divisa et Indivisa (p. 1135)

Vanished Kingdoms (2011)

London: Allen Lane

• On reading somewhere that the Welsh name for 'England', Lloegr, meant 'the Lost Land', I fell for the fancy, imagining what a huge sense of loss and forgetting the name expresses. A learned colleague has since told me that my imagination had outrun the etymology. Yet as someone brought up in English surroundings, I never cease to be amazed that everywhere which we now call 'England' was once not English at all.
  • Introduction (p. 2)

• Historians usually focus their attention on the past of countries that still exist, writing hundreds and thousands of books on British history, French history, German history, Russian history, American history, Chinese history, Indian history, Brazilian history or whatever. Whether consciously or not, they are seeking the roots of the present, thereby putting themselves in danger of reading history backwards. As soon as great powers arise, whether the United States in the twentieth century or China in the twenty-first, the call goes out for offerings on American History or Chinese History, and siren voices sing that today’s important countries are also those whose past is most deserving of examination, that a more comprehensive spectrum of historical knowledge can be safely ignored.
  • Introduction (p. 4)

• One has to put aside the popular notion that language and culture are endlessly passed on from generation to generation, rather as if 'Scottishness' or 'Englishness' were essential constituents of some national genetic code. If this were so, it would never be possible to forge new nations — like the United States of America or Australia — from diverse ethnic elements.
  • Ch. 2: Alt Clud (p. 81)

• All the nations that ever lived have left their footsteps in the sand. The traces fade with every tide, the echoes grow faint, the images are fractured, the human material is atomized and recycled. But if we know where to look, there is always a remnant, a remainder, an irreducible residue.
  • Ch. 7: Borussia (p. 393)

• The difference between a referendum and a plebiscite is a fine one. Both pertain to collective decisions made by the direct vote of all qualified adults. The referendum, which derives from Swiss practice, involves an issue that is provisionally determined in advance, but that is then 'referred' for a final decision by the whole electorate.
  • Ch. 8: Sabaudia (p. 423)

• That the United Kingdom will collapse is a foregone conclusion. Sooner or later, all states do collapse, and ramshackle, asymmetric dynastic amalgamations are more vulnerable than cohesive nation-states. Only the 'how' and the 'when' are mysteries of the future.
  An exhaustive study of the many pillars on which British power and prestige were built — ranging from the monarchy, the Royal Navy and the Empire to the Protestant Ascendancy, the Industrial Revolution, Parliament and Sterling — indicated that all without exception were in decline; some were already defunct, others seriously diminished or debilitated; it suggests that the last act may come sooner rather than later.110 Nothing implies that the end will necessarily be violent; some political organisms dissolve quietly. All it means is that present structures will one day disappear, and be replaced by something else.
  • Ch. 14: Éire (p. 679)

• The immediate future may be determined by a race between the United Kingdom and the EU over which beats the other to a major crisis.
  • Ch. 14: Éire (p. 681)