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

Simon Sebag Montefiore

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" 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

" 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

" Writing about Jerusalem can be such a minefield. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" Mr. Putin presents himself as a czar - and like any czar, he fears revolution above all else. "

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

" 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

" 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

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

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

" I always wanted to write a history of Jerusalem. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

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

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

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

" 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

" I don't feel that Jewish people have a class. "

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" A book's title is vital. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

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

" 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

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

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

" 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

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

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