Top 33 Antony Beevor Quotes

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.

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

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.

The power of historical fiction for bad and for good can be immense in shaping consciousness of the past.

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.

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

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.

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.

Teaching the history of the British Empire links in with that of the world: for better and for worse, the Empire made us what we are, forming our national identity. A country that does not understand its own history is unlikely to respect that of others.

Alpacas are very endearing, and they all have very different personalities.

The duty of a historian is simply to understand and then convey that understanding, no more than that.

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

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

I just love the days when you come out of the archives with half a dozen excellent descriptions or poignant accounts of personal experiences.

At the beginning of June 1944, the war was reaching a climax. German troops had been brutalised by the savagery of the ongoing fighting in Russia, where the Red Army was secretly preparing its vast encirclement of the Germans’ Army Group Centre.

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.

I get slightly obsessive about working in archives because you don’t know what you’re going to find. In fact, you don’t know what you’re looking for until you find it.

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

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

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

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

When we dwell on the enormity of the Second World War and its victims, we try to absorb all those statistics of national and ethnic tragedy. But, as a result, there is a tendency to overlook the way the war changed even the survivors’ lives in ways impossible to predict.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I joined the Army in 1965 and served with the 11th Hussars, which I loved. The regiment was so relaxed – a salute was more like a friendly wave.

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.

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.

I expect the worst both from reviewers and sales and then, with any luck, I may be proved wrong.

I used to write in a room overlooking the valley from where I could see too much, whether checking the sheep and alpacas or seeing the trout rise on the lake.