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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Politicians are often tempted to deploy history as a weapon against each other.
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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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The greatest heroes of the Normandy battlefield were the unarmed medics, whom snipers often shot at despite their Red Cross armbands.
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The reason that 'Stalingrad' took off was because it emphasized the influence of history on the individual.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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There are one or two very good women military historians who use imagination, great study and research; they can put themselves in the boots of the soldier.
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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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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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It is important to understand the continuing, confused fascination with the Second World War. For most of us, the great unspoken question is how would we have behaved in the face of danger and when forced to make major moral choices.
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The power of historical fiction for bad and for good can be immense in shaping consciousness of the past.