Simon Sebag Montefiore Quotes

One of the strange things about doing publicity is that a mistake in a newspaper profile long ago is repeated and amplified over time.

I read many wonderful novels, though I now find the idea of literary fiction obsolete.

She grounded me. I have become very disciplined now. I would never have written the books without her. Definitely the cleverest thing I ever did was to marry Santa. Maybe it’s the only clever thing I did.

Yeltsin was admirable but flawed, noble but tainted, but in his own negligent grandeur, he undermined his own real achievements – and accelerated their ruin.

As a youth, I was much more of a Zionist. But Israel was very different then. Israel’s changed, and so have I.

I love the heat and the excitement of Israel, and I will always love Jerusalem.

I always wanted to write a history of Jerusalem.

It’s the mix of the trivial and the great events that make up history. It’s the low things about high people that make it fascinating, and that’s why it would be a shame to exclude the trivial things. That mixing up is not just at the heart of history. It’s at the heart of how to live a great life.

There is a view of Russian exceptionalism, that they are a unique civilisation, a view right since Ivan the Terrible that Russia is a special civilisation with a special culture. Putin is pushing that now.

A reforming liberal leader in Russia is the Holy Grail of Kremlinology, but the search for one is as misguided and hopeless as that for the relic of the Last Supper.

I see the world as an adventure thriller and a voyage of discovery. To me, all lives are lives of mystery and secrecy, and that’s what I write about.

The vanishing of David Tang is like the unthinkable diappearance of a magnificent palace on a mythical mountaintop. He was a dreammaker, pianist, adventurer, writer, entrepreneur, scholar, connoisseur, and a great friend.

Russia is so feudal in its system of patronage and reward that it is virtually impossible for a leader to hand over power without controlling his successor or at least receiving an exemption from prosecution – something Mr. Putin granted his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, in 1999.

With popular rulers, the wife can become the guardian of their greatness: Peter the Great was succeeded by his wife, Catherine I. Sometimes the wives are an improvement.

As a teenager, I had a weakness for freedom fighters. When Mugabe came to London to negotiate independence, I vanished from home to stand outside his hotel. I was very disappointed that he looked like a dorky teacher.

I much prefer writing fiction. History books, for me, are very hard work, very serious.

When I’m in Jerusalem, I stay at the American Colony Hotel, neutral territory: the secret peace talks of 1992/3 started there.

The unspoken contract between ruler and subject is that in return for safety, prosperity, and prestige, the Russians entrust power and cede democratic freedoms to their leaders.

The tsar of War and Peace, especially in the BBC version, is a complete popinjay and a useless character. The real tsar, Alexander I, had an amazing career.

Lenin had just reflected that the revolution would never happen in his lifetime when in February 1917, hungry crowds in Petrograd overthrew Nicholas II while the revolutionaries were abroad, exiled, or infiltrated by the secret police.

Putin regards Stalin as a great tsar; he is a great tsar. Asked who the worst tsars were, he said Nicholas II and Gorbachev.

Most history books are about power.

Around us, we do see attempts to delegitimize Israel, a sort of secret, hidden anti-Semitism growing in many countries, often on the right but also on the left.

I’m an enormous fan of American literature, and especially the great novels of Larry McMurtry, ‘Lonesome Dove,’ Cormac McCarthy, Elmore Leonard.

Under Stalin, artists weren’t dissidents; all they hoped was to survive and write.

Stalin had 15 scenic seaside villas, some of them czarist palaces, on the Black Sea coast of Abkhazia. In 2002, I visited and photographed these extraordinarily well-preserved Stalinist time capsules.

To make a Frankenstein monster of a complex character like Stalin would have been too simplistic. I wanted to show who he was and, if you like, how he happened.

The memoirs of the Grand Duchess Olga are an entertaining record for anyone interested in the imperial family’s home life during the last years of Russian autocracy.

A revolution resembles the death of a fading star, an exhilarating Technicolor explosion that gives way not to an ordered new galaxy but to a nebula, a formless cloud of shifting energy.

The shameless criminality of Lenin, Stalin, and the Cheka cast a long shadow, but I don’t see their kind returning anytime soon.

I enjoy tequila, which has a strange effect on people and makes parties more fun than warm white wine.

A book’s title is vital.

Colonel Qaddafi’s tyranny was absolutist, monarchical, and personal. The problem with such dictatorships is that as long as the tyrant lives, he reigns and terrorizes.

Real stories – whether in pure fiction or historical – have a certain indefinable power; we are endlessly curious about the past and hungry for learning that we hope will illuminate the present.

Moses Montefiore loved Jerusalem, lived for Jerusalem, and even made it our family motto. A Zionist before the word was invented, he believed in the sacred idea of Jewish return as a religious Jew’s duty, and in Jewish statehood.

Writing about Jerusalem was very stressful; every word counts.

Gay weddings will be remembered as Tony Blair’s greatest achievement!

Bolshevism was a mind-set, an idiosyncratic culture with an intolerant paranoid wordview obsessed with abstruse Marxist ideology.

It is a characteristic of potentates that they don’t succumb to peaceful retirement. Instead, they hold power in their hoary fists as judgment and grip weaken, destroying any successors except family members.

Stalin, of course, never went on trial, but his legacy did. In 1956, three years after his death, he was denounced by Nikita Khrushchev. And his crimes were even more explicitly exposed by Mikhail Gorbachev during the late ’80s. Yet to many, Stalin remains more legitimate as a Russian leader than anyone since.

I don’t think Jerusalem should be controlled 100% by religious people of any denomination, sect, or religion – even my own.

There are few words in Russian for the Western concept of ‘law,’ but there are legions of words for connections, helping people from one’s neck of the woods.

When I’m up, I’m over-exuberant; when I’m down, I just wander round on my own. I have no middle space.

I don’t feel that Jewish people have a class.

In the new Georgia, Stalin is no longer Georgian. He’s a Russian emperor.

Regarding themselves as irreplaceable, both Lenin and Stalin tried in different ways to destroy their successors – Lenin through a testament that attacked Stalin and Trotsky, Stalin through purges culminating in the Doctors’ Plot of 1953.

Russia’s first major intervention began in 1768, when Catherine the Great went to war with the Ottomans, and Count Alexei Orlov, the brother of her lover Grigory, sailed the Baltic fleet through the Strait of Gibraltar to rally rebellions in the Mediterranean.

The political lives of tyrants play out human affairs with a special intensity: the death of a democratic leader long after his retirement is a private matter, but the death of a tyrant is always a political act that reflects the character of his power.

We have far too many Tudors. Henry VIII is far too over-rated. He’s become the ultimate brand name, like the Marks & Spencers of a high street of British history. I’m more interested in King Herod.

The Europeans do tend to delegitimize Israel and turn Israel into a dirty word, which is unforgivable.

I was taught Shakespeare brilliantly by an eccentric genius at Harrow named Jeremy Lemmon who made me want to be a writer.

I’d like to write a biography of Ivan the Terrible.

Every time I give an interview, I seem to offend somebody in my family, usually my mother.

The West is pathetically naive about Russian reformers. We long to believe they are real liberals, but no liberal will ever rule Russia.

After the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russian influence collapsed, and Moscow came to bitterly resent the Western interventions that destroyed Mr. Hussein and Colonel Qaddafi.