Antony Beevor Quotes & Sayings (Page 5)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“When I started to write, I realised that you need a bit of both: the overall context as well as the individual's experience.”

“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.”

“One has this image of the Soviet state and the Red Army as being extremely disciplined but in the first four months of 1945 their soldiers were completely out of control.”