One of the books I got at Christmas was Europe: A History by Norman Davies. This is a big history book, over 1300 pages. I recently read Davies' Vanished Kingdoms and thought it was extremely good.

One of the things I like about him as a historian, apart from being an interesting and knowledgeable writer, is that he gives proper coverage to the entirety of Europe, that is: East, Central and Northern Europe, as well as the usual Western part. To understand and appreciate the history, one needs to know the background to Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Moravia, Ukraine, Hungary and all the other neglected parts of the continent. He wants a less parochial history of Europe.

I would like to post the odd snippet from the book as I find them.

On some of the legacy of the post-Roman world and the great migrations in the centuries after:

Greek persisted in the Eastern Empire, both as the official language and in many places, especially in Asia Minor, as the vernacular. But several areas, including the Peloponnese, were for a period wholly or partly slavicized. One should be wary of oversimplification. But the thesis advanced by the Bavarian scholar, Jakub Fallmerayer (1790-1861), in Ueber die Entstehung der Neugriechen (1835), merits attention. Fallmerayer's work, which caused deep trauma amidst the Greeks of his day, argued that the Greek nation of modern times was largely descended from hellenized Albanians and Slavs, "with hardly a drop of true Greek blood in their veins". This may have been an exaggeration; but it is less absurd than the notion that every modern Greek is a direct ethnic descendant of the inhabitants of ancient Greece. No modern European nation can lay reasonable claim to undiluted "ethnic purity".