Simon Sebag Montefiore Quotes

“Trump wants to be the first American tsar. With his hero worship of Putin, his admiration for the apparent omnipotence of the Kremlin, schoolboyish crush on Putin’s gangster swagger and his contempt for democracy, Trump wants to rule with his family, taking decisions purely because he’s right about everything like a tsar.”

― 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

“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.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“Most history books are about power.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“I am a passionate nonfinisher. Life is too short, and there are too many great books to read, so if I lose interest or respect, I switch. But when, of course, when you really fall in love with a book, all the others are ignored.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“All tyrannies are virtuoso displays, over many years, of cunning, risk-taking, terror, delusion, narcissism, showmanship, and charm, distilled into a spectacle of total personal control.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“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.”

― 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

“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

“Historical fiction is simply fiction set in the past, and should be judged as such.”

― 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

“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.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“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

“I’m not disciplined at all. I barely function. But I get a lot done. I take days off all the time, but when I work, I work very fast and very efficiently. But I’m always having days when I’m feeling a little anxious, and I take a day off. I work in a funny way.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“I’m the last person who would end up doing something that needs meticulous compilation of facts. It’s totally against my character. I live by impulse. I’m totally ill-suited to writing history books.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“I’m the sort of person who, if I arrive in a city under siege, in the middle of nowhere, I’ll always find my way to the leader of the rebels. I just don’t know how.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“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

“A crenelated wall of books encircles my bed, its tottering towers looming ever taller, always on the verge of collapsing onto oblivious sleepers.”

― 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 don’t like sports. I’m not interested in sports. I hate sports.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“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

“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

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

― 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

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

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“In 1918, a police chief of Jerusalem was a Montefiore.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“Writing about Jerusalem was very stressful; every word counts.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“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.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“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

“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.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“Writing about Jerusalem can be such a minefield.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“I always wanted to write a history of Jerusalem.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“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

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

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“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

“Russian writers enjoy almost sacred status.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“The Soviet Union was designed for Muscovite rule, not for division into independent republics. Yet the latter is exactly what happened in 1991 – and the Kremlin has never accepted it.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“’Daddy used to be a Georgian,’ Stalin’s son, Vasily, once said. Actually, the dictator didn’t truly become Russian; he remained Georgian culturally. Yet he embraced the imperial mission of the Russian people.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“As colonial puppeteer and successful restorer of Russia as imperial superpower, Mr. Putin is Stalin’s consummate heir.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“While most know the young Stalin was a seminarian, few realize that he was also a Georgian patriot, a published romantic poet.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“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

“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

“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

“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.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“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.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“The disorder, uncertainty, and strife of a revolution make citizens yearn for stable authority, or they turn to radicalism.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“It was always presumptuous to expect Russia, an ancient nation-state and proud empire of distinct culture with a tradition of autocracy, to become an Anglo-American democracy overnight – just as it is naive to expect it in other parts of the world.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“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.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“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

“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.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

― 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

“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

“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

“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.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“Unlike monarchs, who pass power to their heirs at the moment of death to ensure the survival of the regime, tyrants must simply survive as long as possible.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“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

“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

“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

“Mr. Putin presents himself as a czar – and like any czar, he fears revolution above all else.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“I am ashamed to say that both my children knew Stalin before they knew Thomas the Tank Engine.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“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.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“I love the flamboyance, the melodrama, the bloody theatre of Russian history.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

― 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

“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 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

“In 1942, the Germans were running out of fuel. They were advancing so fast across the grasslands, the hot grasslands of south Russia, and the Russians were running out of tanks. And so both of them turned to cavalry, and there were great cavalry battles on the grasslands.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“When I was young, I always wanted to go to Russia.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“Writing fiction is very different to writing non-fiction. I love writing novels, but on history books, like my biographies of Stalin or Catherine the Great or Jerusalem, I spend endless hours doing vast amounts of research. But it ends up being based on the same principle as all writing about people: and that is curiosity!”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

― Simon Sebag Montefiore

“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.”

― Simon Sebag Montefiore