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
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.
In practice
In a book club discussion about historical novels.
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.
Transience is one of the fundamental characteristics both of the human condition and of the political order.
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.
Why are some things remembered and others forgotten? That is the theme I want to pursue about the Second World War.
Our mental maps are distorted by who are the 'winners' of history and who are the powers of today.
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.
It is personal. That's what an education does. It makes the world personal.
Our priests and presidents, our surgeons and lawyers, our educators and newscasters need worry less about satisfying the demands of their discipline than the demands of good showmanship.
Make this the golden rule, the equivalent of the Hippocratic oath: Everything we ask a child to do should be worth doing.
There's nothing in the world like getting up in front of a high-school classroom in New York City. They won't give you a break if you don't hold them. There's no escape.
I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
I am often amazed at how much more capability and enthusiasm for science there is among elementary school youngsters than among college students.
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