Quotes from Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

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

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.

A book's title is vital.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.