Antony Beevor Quotes

Author Image

Antony Beevor

Profession : Historian

Birth : December 14, 1946

The majority of soldiers and officers of the Soviet Army and the allied armies treated the local population humanely.

Antony Beevor

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.

Antony Beevor

What is terrifying is the ability, through mass brainwashing or propaganda, to change normal human instinct, which does not necessarily contain very much hatred.

Antony Beevor

The British bombing of Caen beginning on D-Day in particular was stupid, counter-productive and above all very close to a war crime.

Antony Beevor

The reason that 'Stalingrad' took off was because it emphasized the influence of history on the individual.

Antony Beevor

I have come across both inspiring teachers of history and deplorable ones over the years, so one cannot generalise, except perhaps to observe that the profession seems to encourage anti-militarist sentiments.

Antony Beevor

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.

Antony Beevor

To begin impatiently is the worst mistake a writer can make.

Antony Beevor

When I was a child I had something called Perthes' Disease which meant I was on crutches, so I was bullied at school and all that sort of stuff.

Antony Beevor

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.

Antony Beevor

Of course history is easily manipulated - though that makes it even more important for us to know what actually happened.

Antony Beevor

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.

Antony Beevor

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.

Antony Beevor

The blurring of fact and fiction has great commercial potential, which is bound to be corrupting in historical terms.

Antony Beevor

I can't envisage stopping writing.

Antony Beevor

Restorers of paintings and pottery follow a code of conduct in their work to distinguish the original material from what they are adding later.

Antony Beevor

Some novelists want to give people in history a voice because they have been denied it in the past.

Antony Beevor

I think it's outrageous if a historian has a 'leading thought' because it means they will select their material according to their thesis.

Antony Beevor

Politicians are often tempted to deploy history as a weapon against each other.

Antony Beevor

Entertainment history is now the main source of supposedly historical knowledge for more and more people, but 'histo-tainment' is superficial and lacks all context.

Antony Beevor