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" 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
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" In 1918, a police chief of Jerusalem was a Montefiore. "
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" 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. "
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" When we were in school, we were told that Stalin was a madman who got control of Europe, which teaches you nothing. "
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" When I'm up, I'm over-exuberant; when I'm down, I just wander round on my own. I have no middle space. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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
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Never
" 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! "
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" Most history books are about power. "
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" Yeltsin was admirable but flawed, noble but tainted, but in his own negligent grandeur, he undermined his own real achievements - and accelerated their ruin. "
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" 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. "
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" 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
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" 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
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" 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
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" 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
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" I'd like to write a biography of Ivan the Terrible. "
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" Russian writers enjoy almost sacred status. "
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" 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. "
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" Bolshevism was a mind-set, an idiosyncratic culture with an intolerant paranoid wordview obsessed with abstruse Marxist ideology. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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