Quotes from Simon Sebag Montefiore

Stalin, of course, never went on trial, but his legacy did. In 1956, three years after his death, he was denounced by Nikita Khrushchev. And his crimes were even more explicitly exposed by Mikhail Gorbachev during the late '80s. Yet to many, Stalin remains more legitimate as a Russian leader than anyone since.

Historical fiction is simply fiction set in the past, and should be judged as such.

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.

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.

I love the flamboyance, the melodrama, the bloody theatre of Russian history.

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.

As a youth, I was much more of a Zionist. But Israel was very different then. Israel's changed, and so have I.

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.

No one can take away the experience of Yeltsin's freedoms, but Russian democracy will never follow Western models: other authoritarian 'controlled democracies' - Turkey, Taiwan, Mexico - ultimately developed into democracies. But it took decades.

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.

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.

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.

I always find that the more Jewish you are, the more people respect you.

Colonel Qaddafi's tyranny was absolutist, monarchical, and personal. The problem with such dictatorships is that as long as the tyrant lives, he reigns and terrorizes.

The political lives of tyrants play out human affairs with a special intensity: the death of a democratic leader long after his retirement is a private matter, but the death of a tyrant is always a political act that reflects the character of his power.

We have far too many Tudors. Henry VIII is far too over-rated. He's become the ultimate brand name, like the Marks & Spencers of a high street of British history. I'm more interested in King Herod.

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.

The West is pathetically naive about Russian reformers. We long to believe they are real liberals, but no liberal will ever rule Russia.

I was taught Shakespeare brilliantly by an eccentric genius at Harrow named Jeremy Lemmon who made me want to be a writer.

Yeltsin was admirable but flawed, noble but tainted, but in his own negligent grandeur, he undermined his own real achievements - and accelerated their ruin.

While most know the young Stalin was a seminarian, few realize that he was also a Georgian patriot, a published romantic poet.

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.

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

To make a Frankenstein monster of a complex character like Stalin would have been too simplistic. I wanted to show who he was and, if you like, how he happened.