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" Alexander II really used autocracy well to negotiate the freeing of the serfs in 1861. "
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Used
Really
Negotiate
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" 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
Long
Returning
See
" 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
Family
Hero
Democracy
" I love the heat and the excitement of Israel, and I will always love Jerusalem. "
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Always
Heat
Excitement
" If only all straight weddings could be somehow gay-ified. "
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Could
Only
Somehow
" 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
Death
Revolution
Cloud
" 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
Influence
Soviet
Union
" 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
People
Curiosity
Great
" I enjoy tequila, which has a strange effect on people and makes parties more fun than warm white wine. "
Simon Sebag Montefiore
People
Enjoy
Fun
" 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
Personal
Over
Narcissism
" 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
Who
Show
You
" Most history books are about power. "
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Most
About
Books
" 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
Tyranny
Problem
He
" Every time I give an interview, I seem to offend somebody in my family, usually my mother. "
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Time
Seem
Mother
" The Europeans do tend to delegitimize Israel and turn Israel into a dirty word, which is unforgivable. "
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Dirty
Israel
Tend
" Bolshevism was a mind-set, an idiosyncratic culture with an intolerant paranoid wordview obsessed with abstruse Marxist ideology. "
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Obsessed
Paranoid
Culture
" 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
Pink
Life
Moon
" 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
Father
Family
He
" 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
Running
Battles
Hot
" '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
Used
Son
Said
" 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
Books
Towers
Wall
" The disorder, uncertainty, and strife of a revolution make citizens yearn for stable authority, or they turn to radicalism. "
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Turn
Authority
Uncertainty
" Historical fiction is simply fiction set in the past, and should be judged as such. "
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Historical
Past
In The Past
" 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
Ruin
Admirable
He
" I much prefer writing fiction. History books, for me, are very hard work, very serious. "
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Writing
Hard Work
History
" 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
Literature
American
Dove
" 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
Romantic
Know
Patriot
" 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
Legacy
Late
Three
" 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
Peace
American
Hotel
" Under Stalin, artists weren't dissidents; all they hoped was to survive and write. "
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Were
Write
Artists
" 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
History
World
Revolution