"I always needle a bit when people say I'm a champion of the Poles, because I've always had a very multinational view of Poland."His new book, Microcosm (Cape, £30), is a collaboration with Roger Moorhouse, a former student who acted as chief researcher for Europe. This latest project has a tight focus, but looks likely to create big waves. Microcosm is the history of a city – Wroclaw in Silesia, western Poland – originally commissioned from Davies by the post-Communist mayor, "a typical Solidarity character who had come out of nowhere".It sounds parochial In fact, this is an incendiary tale. For Wroclaw, standing right in the cockpit of central Europe's warring dynasties, has had many names and many overlords down the centuries. In the early Middle Ages, the Poles did run "Wrotizla" for a spell. Later, the Bohemians of Prague took over "Vretslav", followed by the Austrian Habsburg rulers of "Presslaw". Then, in 1741, Frederick the Great of Prussia seized "Bresslau", which grew into one of the greatest of all German cities.In 1871, Breslau ranked third in the Kaiser's new Empire behind Berlin and Hamburg.

The city flourished as a centre of German industry, education, science and the arts – and home to a pantheon of august Germans from Dr Alois Alzheimer to the "Red Baron" Manfred von Richthofen – until Soviet forces pulverised it in 1945.Now we reach the centre of this historical minefield. German Breslau – in common with many eastern German lands – was ethnically cleansed at the end of the war Davies searches for a British analogy. "The expulsions in central Europe were extremely brutal and very, very short. A town the size of Manchester, which within two years, is completely emptied of its English population and repopulated by Frenchmen from Lille – you have to imagine something like that." Many of the Polish incomers to "Wroclaw" had themselves been expelled by the Soviet forces from the city of L'viv, now in Ukraine – the family home of Davies's in-laws.Microcosm is a paradoxical performance. Much of this meticulous, evocative history of a Polish city, commissioned by a Polish mayor from a famous friend of Poland, reads like an elegy for the crushed German culture of Silesia. The account of vanished glory chimes with one of the hottest debates in European politics now.

Put crudely, many Germans have begun to feel like victims again. The Red Army carved great chunks off their historic homelands in 1945. After the guilty silence of the post-Holocaust era, the millions of refugees Stalin sent packing – and their children – have found a voice. Davies wonders if our own relations with Germany might grow smoother "once the British see Germans not simply as the enemy, but also in certain circumstances as the oppressed, the victims."As Davies plays his historical hand, the finger of accusation moves east It settles over Moscow. All his work underlines the brutally aggressive tendencies of the Russian and Soviet empires – a pattern masked, he thinks, by a pro-Russian bias among Brits ever since Napoleon. He thinks that "the Russian myths of the Second World War are still intact", although a book he plans for the 60th anniversary of peace in 2005 will certainly do its bit to shatter them.Not even his assaults on pro-Soviet sentimentality, however, have proved as inflammatory as some brief, taboo-breaking references to the prominent role of Jews in the Stalinist secret police of post-war Poland.