Great Regulars: [Norman] Davies had married a Polish woman

in 1966. He became a Catholic in deference to the marriage — he retains a degree of faith — and, over the years, grew ever more sympathetic to the plight of the Poles in the 20th century. He saw, above all, that the western narrative of the second world war tended to devalue the monumental suffering of the east. This landed him in a famous academic dispute in the 1980s, when he was offered a job at Stanford University, in California, only to have it withdrawn when it was suggested that his obsession with the sufferings of the east was minimising the Holocaust. Ugly charges of anti-semitism were made.

“I ran into the buffers at Stanford. Essentially, I was fired before I had been appointed because they got together and decided my history of Poland didn’t say what they wanted. They couldn’t find anything wrong with it, it just didn’t tell the story they wanted.”

from Bryan Appleyard: from The Sunday Times: Vanished Kingdoms

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