The historical profession is nowhere famous for its tolerance, but there are not many countries where historians can expect to pay for their opinions with penal servitude or the firing squad.
Norman DaviesRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Books should be engaging and informative; otherwise, they fail their purpose.
This quote highlights the importance of making history both intellectually rigorous and accessible to readers. Norman Davies criticizes historians who produce overly academic work that lacks readability, suggesting that such writing does not effectively communicate ideas or engage an audience, ultimately detracting from the value of historical scholarship.
Themes
BooksHistoryEducationEntertainmentReadability
In practice
Example use cases
In a book club discussion about historical novels.
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Nowadays, it is no longer possible to maintain that the Nazi-Soviet pact of 23 August 1939 was a fiction invented by bourgeois-imperialist enemies. Everyone has seen the film clips of Herr Ribbentrop landing in Moscow, and of Stalin smiling broadly as Ribbentrop and Molotov signed up side by side.
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Why are some things remembered and others forgotten? That is the theme I want to pursue about the Second World War.
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Our mental maps are distorted by who are the 'winners' of history and who are the powers of today.
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One might have thought that 70 years was time enough to work out what really happened in 1939. It isn't the case. Misunderstandings and misinformation abound.
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