Antony Beevor
Antony Beevor
Antony James Beevor, FRSLis an English military historian. He has published several popular histories on the Second World War and the 20th century in general...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth14 December 1946
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The power of historical fiction for bad and for good can be immense in shaping consciousness of the past.
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The memory of the Second World War hangs over Europe, an inescapable and irresistible point of reference. Historical parallels are usually misleading and dangerous.
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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.
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Historical truth and the marketing needs of the movie and television industry remain fundamentally incompatible.
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I am not someone who believes I am going to find a historical scoop.
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The blurring of fact and fiction has great commercial potential, which is bound to be corrupting in historical terms.
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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.
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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.
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The punishment of shaving a woman's head had biblical origins. In Europe, the practice dated back to the Dark Ages with the Visigoths.
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The majority of soldiers and officers of the Soviet Army and the allied armies treated the local population humanely.
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Counter-knowledge covers the propagation of false legends and conspiracy theories often used for political purposes or fundamentalist religious propaganda.
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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.
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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.
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A blend of fact and fiction has been used in various forms since the dawn of creative writing, starting with sagas and epic poems.