Quotes from Simon Sebag Montefiore

When Moses sought the nature of this God, asking 'What is thy name?', he received the majestically forbidding reply, 'I AM THAT I AM,' a God without a name, rendered in Hebrew as YHWH: Yahweh or, as Christians later misspelt it, Jehovah.

If you want to know the people around you," Stalin said, "find out what they read.

The Cheka, precursor of the OGPU, NKVD, KGB and today's FSB, had absolute supralegal power over life and death. 'In that case why should we bother with a People's

He asked, 'How can you make a revolution without firing-squads?

The Russian empire, it is estimated, grew by fifty-five square miles (142 square kilometres) per day after the Romanovs came to the throne in 1613, or 20,000 square miles a year. By the late nineteenth century, they ruled one sixth of the earth's surface—and they were still expanding. Empire-building was in a Romanov's blood.

Herzl concluded that Jews could never be safe without their own homeland. At first, this half-pragmatist, half-utopian dreamed of a Germanic aristocratic republic, a Jewish Venice ruled by a senate with a Rothschild as princely doge and himself as chancellor. His vision was secular: the high priests "will wear impressive robes"; the Herzl army would boast cuirassiers with silver breastplates; his modern Jewish citizens would play cricket and tennis in a modern Jerusalem.

In a colossal bureaucracy run like a nepotistic village, Stalin showed himself a master of personal politics.180 He was the patron of these brutal tendencies but also their personification: he was right when he blasphemously declared in 1929 that 'the Party has made me in its own image'. He and the Party had

Faced with Russian menace and Ottoman collapse, Britain and France threatened war. Nicholas stubbornly called their bluff because, he explained, he was "waging war for a solely Christian purpose, under the banner of the Holy Cross." On 28 March 1853, the French and British declared war on Russia. Even though most of the fighting was far away in the Crimea, this war placed Jerusalem at the centre of the world stage where she has remained ever since.f

For 1,000 years, Jerusalem was exclusively Jewish; for about 400 years, Christian; for 1,300 years, Islamic; and not one of the three faiths ever gained Jerusalem without the sword, the mangonel or the howitzer.

The war could not be won – but could it be ended with honour?

Fulk the Black, Count of Anjou and founder of the Angevin dynasty that later ruled England, came on pilgrimage after he had burned his wife alive in her wedding-dress having found her guilty of adultery with a swineherd.

It was Balfour, who as prime minister in 1903, had offered Uganda to the Zionists, but now he was out of power. Weizmann feared that his languid interest was just 'a mask', so he explained that if Moses had heard about Ugandaism 'he would surely have broken the tablets again'.

Ideology must be our foundation as it was for the Bolsheviks, but the new archives show that the personalities and patronage of a minuscule oligarchy were the essence of politics under Lenin and Stalin, as they were under the Romanov emperors—and just as they are today under the 'managed democracy' of twenty-first-century Russia.

I lived each minute and each day as it came. I sought joy in the smallest things. I looked at the stars and the moon and thought that those I love might be looking at them too. Moon magic.

Once again the centre of international storms. Neither Athens nor Rome aroused so many passions. When a Jew visits Jerusalem for the first time, it's not the first time, it's a homecoming. —ELIE WIESEL, open letter to BARACK OBAMA,

Stalin was formed by much more than a miserable childhood, just as the USSR was formed by much more than Marxist ideology.

Edith Wharton with the death penalty

Is there any greater blessing than to love and be loved.

The autocracy was legitimized by its ever-expanding multi-faith, multi-ethnic empire, yet the later emperors regarded themselves as the leaders first of the Russian nation but then of the entire Slavic community. The more they embraced Russian nationalism, the more they excluded (and often persecuted) their huge non-Russian populations,

I'm a Russian. Without the Motherland, I'd be nothing.

Biblia a devenit Cartea C?r?ilor, dar nu constituie un singur document. Este o bibliotec? mistic? alc?tuit? din texte ce se întrep?trund, ale unor autori anonimi care le-au scris ?i le-au editat în momente diferite, în scopuri divergente.

Its heart was the alliance between the Romanovs and the nobility who needed royal support to control their estates. Serfdom was the foundation of this partnership. The ideal of autocracy was in practice a deal whereby the Romanovs enjoyed absolute power and delivered imperial glory while the nobility ruled their estates unchallenged. The

To return to where we started, there have always been two Jerusalems, the temporal and the celestial, both ruled more by faith and emotion than by reason and facts. And Jerusalem remains the centre of the world.

Now in Medina, with its Jewish clans, he created the first mosque,a adopting the Jerusalem Temple as the first qibla, the direction of prayer. He prayed at Friday sundown—the Jewish Sabbath—fasted on the Day of Atonement, banned pork and practised circumcision. The oneness of Muhammad's God rejected the Christian Trinity but other rituals—the prostration on prayer mats—owed much to Christian monasteries;