Antony Beevor Quotes
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The duty of a historian is simply to understand and then convey that understanding, no more than that.
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Of course history is easily manipulated - though that makes it even more important for us to know what actually happened.
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It is important to understand the continuing, confused fascination with the Second World War. For most of us, the great unspoken question is how would we have behaved in the face of danger and when forced to make major moral choices.
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I feel slightly uneasy at the way historians are consulted as if history is going to repeat itself. It never does.
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When my first novel was published, I went in great excitement round bookshops in central London to see if they had stocked it.
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I can't envisage stopping writing.
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The great help of being in the Army is to understand why are the armies clever in what they describe as emotional intelligence, making soldiers come to terms with the death of comrades by certain rituals.
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The punishment of shaving a woman's head had biblical origins. In Europe, the practice dated back to the Dark Ages with the Visigoths.
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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.
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It was only after five years in the army, when I was having to do a very boring job in a very boring place, that I thought: 'Why not try writing a novel?' partly out of youthful arrogance and partly because there had been a long line of writers in my mother's family.
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There are one or two very good women military historians who use imagination, great study and research; they can put themselves in the boots of the soldier.
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I am not someone who believes I am going to find a historical scoop.
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Counter-knowledge covers the propagation of false legends and conspiracy theories often used for political purposes or fundamentalist religious propaganda.
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It takes me three or four years to research and write each book and the individual stories stay with you for a long time afterwards.
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Without an understanding of history, we are politically, culturally and socially impoverished. If we sacrifice history to economic pressures or to budget cuts, we will lose a part of who we are.
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The British bombing of Caen beginning on D-Day in particular was stupid, counter-productive and above all very close to a war crime.
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In the Iraq war, for instance, so much of the information is digitized and can easily be wiped out. That will make it very hard to write accurate histories. Also, there's a much greater opportunity for suppression of information before it can even be archived.
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What is terrifying is the ability, through mass brainwashing or propaganda, to change normal human instinct, which does not necessarily contain very much hatred.
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The greatest heroes of the Normandy battlefield were the unarmed medics, whom snipers often shot at despite their Red Cross armbands.
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School-leavers unfortunately will come away thinking the First World War consisted simply of 'going over the top' on the Western Front to slaughter in no-man's-land, when the conflict extended so much further, to the collapse of four empires and numerous civil wars.
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The vital thing for me is to integrate the history from above with the history from below because only in that way can you show the true consequences of the decisions of Hitler or Stalin or whomever on the ordinary civilians caught up in the battle.
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The power of historical fiction for bad and for good can be immense in shaping consciousness of the past.
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The reason that 'Stalingrad' took off was because it emphasized the influence of history on the individual.
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I was in Estonia when a professor asked me if I was aware that making any criticism of the Red Army during the war was now an imprisonable offence. I was quite shaken.