96 Quotes by Antony Beevor

A blend of fact and fiction has been used in various forms since the dawn of creative writing, starting with sagas and epic poems.

At the beginning of June 1944, the war was reaching a climax. German troops had been brutalised by the savagery of the ongoing fighting in Russia, where the Red Army was secretly preparing its vast encirclement of the Germans' Army Group Centre.

When we dwell on the enormity of the Second World War and its victims, we try to absorb all those statistics of national and ethnic tragedy. But, as a result, there is a tendency to overlook the way the war changed even the survivors' lives in ways impossible to predict.

I am not someone who believes I am going to find a historical scoop.

Counter-knowledge covers the propagation of false legends and conspiracy theories often used for political purposes or fundamentalist religious propaganda.

The great European dream was to diminish militant nationalism. We would all be happy Europeans together. But we are going to see the old monster of militant nationalism being awoken when people realise how little control their politicians have.

The majority of soldiers and officers of the Soviet Army and the allied armies treated the local population humanely.

The duty of a historian is simply to understand and then convey that understanding, no more than that.

The punishment of shaving a woman's head had biblical origins. In Europe, the practice dated back to the Dark Ages with the Visigoths.