Norman Davies

By Daniel Snowman | Published in History Today Volume: 55 Issue: 7 2005

Daniel Snowman meets the historian of Poland, Europe and ‘The Isles’.

What led Norman Davies to his lifelong interest in Poland? An accident, it seems. At the height of the Cold War, he and a bunch of student friends decided to go by train to Moscow but the USSR embassy wouldn’t grant visas. Dejected, they checked the map to see how far their tickets would take them before reaching the Soviet border. The last stop would be Warsaw. Very well, they thought and went off to see the Poles. Would they give visas? Certainly, said a cheery official – adding sotto voce that it was a pleasure helping people who’d been rejected by the Russians!

Some forty-odd years on, OUP have just reissued a revised edition of Davies’ two-volume history of Poland, God’s Playground, bringing the story up to date. Or nearly up-to-date. We were meeting on the day of the Pope’s funeral and Davies had flown back the night before from an emotional, crowd-packed Krakow. If there’s ever a third edition, he would like to include an assessment of the impact and legacy of the ‘greatest Pole’ of modern times, John Paul II.

This article is available to History Today online subscribers only. If you are a subscriber, please log in.

Please choose one of these options to access this article:

Purchase a online subscription and receive unlimited access to our archive for one week, one month or a year

Purchase a print and website subscription, giving you one year's access to all our content and 12 editions of History Today magazine.

If you are already a print subscriber, purchase the online archive upgrade for a year's worth of access at a reduced price

Call our Subscriptions department on +44 (0)20 3219 7813 for more information.

If you are logged in but still cannot access the article, please contact us

Tags: Norman,Medieval (4th-15thC),

If you enjoyed this article, you might like these:

This Month's Magazine

Subscribe to our weekly e-newsletter:

From The Current Issue

History Today App

From The Archive

Lords of the Northern Forest

The Hudson's Bay Company was one of the central forces moulding the development of the vast tracts of land that today are Canada - but as Barry Gough explains here, the circumstances of its launch in 1670 also reveal much about the commercial forces, personalities and rivalries of Restoration England.