British - Historian | December 14, 1946 -
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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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When I started to write, I realised that you need a bit of both: the overall context as well as the individual's experience.
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Some novelists want to give people in history a voice because they have been denied it in the past.
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Restorers of paintings and pottery follow a code of conduct in their work to distinguish the original material from what they are adding later.
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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.
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Of course history is easily manipulated - though that makes it even more important for us to know what actually happened.
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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.
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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.
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