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.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Power Men Death

President Trump is, some ways, the personification of a new Bolshevism of the Right, where the ends justify the means and acceptable tactics include lies and smears and the exploitation of what Lenin called 'useful idiots.'

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Where Ways Way

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

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Wedding Men Great

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

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Time Turning Turn

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.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Success Power Peace

I was driving across Georgia with a warlord and his bodyguards riding shotgun with their Kalashnikovs in a convoy of Mercedes and Land Rovers. The guy put on Pink Floyd's 'Dark Side of the Moon' on a cassette, which they played on loudspeakers as we raced across the mountains, and I remember thinking, 'This sure beats respectable life in England.'

Simon Sebag Montefiore

War Respect Life

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.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Power Men Death

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.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Love Family Zionist

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

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Writer Write Who

Believe it or not, some Western analysts in the 1930s insisted that Stalin was a 'moderate,' controlled by extremists like the secret police chief Nikolai Yezhov.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Western West Ted

I always wanted to write a history of Jerusalem.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

History Write Ways

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

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Will West Us

Nicholas I has been called 'Genghis Khan with a telegraph.' Stalin was 'Genghis Khan with a telephone.' But Mr. Putin is not Genghis Khan with a BlackBerry.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Wit Tin Telephone

Saddam Hussein admired, studied, and copied Stalin, the paragon of modern dictators.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Sad Us T

Writing about Jerusalem can be such a minefield.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Writing USA Us

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.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Wing Win Us

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.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Death Years Year

Alexander II really used autocracy well to negotiate the freeing of the serfs in 1861.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Well Used Use

President Yeltsin's instincts were decent: he encouraged the marketplace, the press flourished, and everything started to open - even the KGB archives. Yeltsin reburied Nicholas II. Free from Soviet anti-semitism, he surrounded himself with Jewish capitalists and advisers who returned to public life for the first time since the 1920s.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Time Life Courage

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.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

War Love Great

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.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Success Men Ways

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

Simon Sebag Montefiore

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.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

The Russian Revolution mobilized a popular passion across the world based on Marxism-Leninism, fueled by messianic zeal. It was, perhaps, after the three Abrahamic religions, the greatest millenarian rapture of human history.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

I don't like sports. I'm not interested in sports. I hate sports.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

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.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

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.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Every Russian emperor from Peter the Great to Stalin and Putin knows a leader and his security agencies must never be parted. His safety depends on their slavish devotion.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Writing about Jerusalem was very stressful; every word counts.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

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.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

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.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

When we were in school, we were told that Stalin was a madman who got control of Europe, which teaches you nothing.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

I always find that the more Jewish you are, the more people respect you.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

Simon Sebag Montefiore

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.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Mugabe's resignation fascinates because the fall of tyrants is always a family story, decline of the father, writ large. What a strange creature he is.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

My wife Santa is a fanatical skier, going to Klosters many times a year. To please her, I have for 12 years tried to ski, abseil, mountain-climb, para-scend, heli-ski, land-lauf, ice-skate, toboggan, luge, bobsleigh, yodel, gulp gluhwein, dunk bread in cheese fondue, or even walk in the mountains. I have failed at every one of these pursuits.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

Simon Sebag Montefiore

I can never resist Ruritanian intrigue: I was once charged with the task of offering the Estonian throne to Prince Edward. Feeling like a Dumas Musketeer on a mission, I did so, but he turned it down.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

A book's title is vital.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

In Georgia, where I spend much time, the democratically elected pro-western President Mikhail Saakashvili has been beleaguered by a riotous opposition which proposes creating a constitutional monarchy under the Bagrationi dynasty, with a Spanish racing driver, Prince 'Jorge' Bagrationi, as king.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

If only all straight weddings could be somehow gay-ified.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

No one can take away the experience of Yeltsin's freedoms, but Russian democracy will never follow Western models: other authoritarian 'controlled democracies' - Turkey, Taiwan, Mexico - ultimately developed into democracies. But it took decades.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

Simon Sebag Montefiore

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.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

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.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

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.

Simon Sebag Montefiore