Antony Beevor Quotes

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.
I was planning to stay in the Army all my life, but I ended up being posted to a training camp in Wales and was so bored there, I wrote a novel.
I'm often reassured in a bizarre - perhaps perverse - way when I find in the archive stuff that contradicts what my assumptions have been. That's interesting and exciting.
If you smash a city when you're trying to capture it, you actually end up providing the perfect terrain for the defenders while blocking the access for your own armoured vehicles.
In my library/study/barn, there is a Ping-Pong table on which I can pile working books and spread maps.
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.
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.
It is this compulsion to look backwards at a time of crisis because one's got no idea of what lies ahead. There is a notion of security that somehow it must resemble the past. It's never going to. Just because we muddled through in the past doesn't mean we can automatically muddle through in the future.
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.
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.
Of course history is easily manipulated - though that makes it even more important for us to know what actually happened.
One has this image of the Soviet state and the Red Army as being extremely disciplined but in the first four months of 1945 their soldiers were completely out of control.
Politicians are often tempted to deploy history as a weapon against each other.
Restorers of paintings and pottery follow a code of conduct in their work to distinguish the original material from what they are adding later.
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.
Some novelists want to give people in history a voice because they have been denied it in the past.
Teaching the history of the British Empire links in with that of the world: for better and for worse, the Empire made us what we are, forming our national identity. A country that does not understand its own history is unlikely to respect that of others.
The blurring of fact and fiction has great commercial potential, which is bound to be corrupting in historical terms.
The British bombing of Caen beginning on D-Day in particular was stupid, counter-productive and above all very close to a war crime.
The duty of a historian is simply to understand and then convey that understanding, no more than that.
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AuthorName
Antony Beevor
Profession
Historian
BirthDate
14 December, 1946
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