But the fact is we did have colonies in the east of Poland, we did have a slave economy there. But this is not common knowledge - or part of our national myth. It goes against the current romanticised view of the government, and much of the country, that Poles have always been victims, never oppressors.

There are two kinds of man: the ones who make history and the ones who endure it.

You can't write about history without writing about politics at some point. History is about movements of people. 'What is criminality and what is government' is a theme that runs through every history.

In many ways, the North won the Civil War militarily and then lost the peace. You know, a group of writers, included many Confederate generals, began a school of thought called the Lost Cause in which they began to romanticize the Confederacy.

Stalin's machine can be started up again at only a moment's notice: the same informers, the same denunciations, the same tortures. The same universal, all-devouring terror.

When people talk as if the Crusades were nothing more than an aggressive raid against Islam, they seem to forget in the strangest way that Islam itself was only an aggressive raid against the old and ordered civilization in these parts. I do not say it in mere hostility to the religion of Mahomet; I am fully conscious of many values and virtues in it; but certainly it was Islam that was the invasion and Christendom that was the thing invaded.