Antony Beevor Quotes

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Antony Beevor

Profession : Historian

Birth : December 14, 1946

I read round the subject, I make a skeleton outline, and then I start work in the relevant archives. During the marshaling of the material, I copy the material from each archive file across to the relevant chapter in the skeleton outline.

Antony Beevor

Every country has its own perspective on the Second World War. This is not surprising when experiences and memories are so different.

Antony Beevor

I love 'Blackadder,' but history it certainly ain't.

Antony Beevor

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.

Antony Beevor

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.

Antony Beevor

I just write the sort of book that I would enjoy reading myself, a book that is both scholarly and recreates the experience of people at that time.

Antony Beevor

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.

Antony Beevor

The punishment of shaving a woman's head had biblical origins. In Europe, the practice dated back to the Dark Ages with the Visigoths.

Antony Beevor

Counter-knowledge covers the propagation of false legends and conspiracy theories often used for political purposes or fundamentalist religious propaganda.

Antony Beevor

I believe passionately in preemptive pessimism, especially before a book comes out. I expect the worst both from reviewers and sales, and then, with any luck, I may be proved wrong.

Antony Beevor

The temptation in any approaching crisis or conflict is, because people haven't got a clue what lies ahead, they're always searching into the past for some sort of pattern ... to galvanise the nation or their supporters and put themselves on a pedestal to sound Churchillian or Rooseveltian.

Antony Beevor

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.

Antony Beevor

I feel slightly uneasy at the way historians are consulted as if history is going to repeat itself. It never does.

Antony Beevor

The greatest heroes of the Normandy battlefield were the unarmed medics, whom snipers often shot at despite their Red Cross armbands.

Antony Beevor

At a purely practical level, history is important because it provides the basic skills needed for students to go further in sociology, politics, international relations and economics. History is also an ideal discipline for almost all careers in the law, the civil service and the private sector.

Antony Beevor

I am not someone who believes I am going to find a historical scoop.

Antony Beevor

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.

Antony Beevor

Historical truth and the marketing needs of the movie and television industry remain fundamentally incompatible.

Antony Beevor

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.

Antony Beevor