Quotes from Simon Sebag Montefiore

Perhaps 20 million had been killed; 28 million deported, of whom 18 million had slaved in the Gulags. Yet, after so much slaughter, they were still believers. At

So much can be explained by the habitual clumsiness of totalitarian panic.

History is little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind." --- Edward Gibbon

I'd never have married', said Alexei to the sobbing Natalya, 'if I'd known our time was to be so short,

Sacrul are nevoie nu doar de spiritualitate ?i credin??, ci ?i de legitimitate ?i tradi?ie.

You're too cute, Katinka, for a historian.

Nobility would be defined by the privilege of owning other human beings, setting a Russian pattern of behaviour: servility to those above, tyranny to those below.

He has gone out from his place, to make your land a waste.

For most of history – the next eight and a half millennia – life expectancy was around thirty.

Stalin impressed Trotsky, whose description reveals why he lost their struggle for power. 'Stalin was very valuable behind the scenes,' he wrote. 'He did have the knack of convincing the average run

In 1267, a pilgrim, the old Spanish rabbi known as Ramban, mourned her eclipse: I compare you, my mother, to the woman whose son died in her lap and painfully there is milk in her breasts and she suckles the pups of dogs. And despite all that, your lovers abandoned you and your enemies desolated you, but faraway they remember and glorify the Holy City.

around the streets, some of the troops started firing haphazardly at burzoi shoppers on Nevsky Prospect. Gunfights broke out. Out at the Kronstadt naval base, Bolshevik sailors rose up, murdered 120 officers, including their admiral, and then demanded that Lenin, Zinoviev and Kamenev give them their orders to take the capital.

Nijedan dan, nijedan sat, nijedan minut nije prošao a da ga nije razdirala želja da je vidi, da joj pri?a, da je dodiruje. Žudeo je da se nasla?uje gledaju?i je, da napoji svoja se?anja, tako da posle, kad više ne bude s njom, može u mislima da je dodirne i oseti. (...) Ali ljubav uvek ra?a patnju. (...) Može li to potrajati? Ne smemo gubiti ni trenutka, pomislio je.

obtain one's objective.' As Stalin later told Molotov, 'Truth is protected by a battalion of lies.

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.

I'm the sort of person who, if I arrive in a city under siege, in the middle of nowhere, I'll always find my way to the leader of the rebels. I just don't know how.

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

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.

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.

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.

I always wanted to write a history of Jerusalem.

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

Writing about Jerusalem can be such a minefield.

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