for the audio interview at BBC (with transcript)
At his bestest: Europe: a History
“For some reason,” he writes, “it has been the fashion among some historians to minimize the impact of the Magyars … all this means is that the Magyars did not reach Cambridge.” He then goes on to list the effects of the great Magyar invasion of the ninth century: within sixty years they helped form modern Hungary, as well as Bohemia, Poland, Serbia and Croatia, Austria and Germany; they permanently separated the northern Slavs from their southern cousins; they opened the way for German colonists to come down the Danube. “Only armchair historians, sitting in a backwater of an offshore island, might judge such developments trivial.”
In EUROPE EAST AND WEST Davies argues for a comprehensive view that challenges Western stereotypes and no longer ignores the history and experience of Eastern Europe. He shows that the conventional exclusion of Central and Eastern Europe has led to serious shortcomings of our understanding of one of the most crucial episodes in European history, namely the Second World War. The essays confront prevalent distortions and prejudices; taken together, they also form a meditation on the art of history writing itself.
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