Myth-making is absolutely necessary to create the simplified images that people live off.

We don't want to create any more damage than absolutely necessary. But in areas that had high water, we have to go in. There's still a chance that somebody might be in these residences.

One of the few things that can be said for certain about Europe's prehistoric peoples is that they all came from somewhere else.

People don't see very often their death coming... Look at the French Revolution: The king of France was thinking in the 1780s, 'We're doing rather better than my father in the 1770s.'

In 1945, when the Second World War technically ends in Poland, the incoming Soviet army liberates some groups of people but begins to oppress the general population, in some ways more harshly than it had happened before.

For people familiar with Eastern Europe, Marci Shore's 'The Taste of Ashes' is, in spite of its subject matter, delicious. A professor at Yale with much experience in Eastern Europe, she writes with great sureness of touch, weaving personal recollections with intellectual commentary and ideas with emotions, including her own.