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. Simon Sebag Montefiore Read Quote
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. Simon Sebag Montefiore Read Quote
Bolshevism was a mind-set, an idiosyncratic culture with an intolerant paranoid wordview obsessed with abstruse Marxist ideology. Simon Sebag Montefiore Read Quote
Mr. Putin presents himself as a czar – and like any czar, he fears revolution above all else. Simon Sebag Montefiore Read Quote
I am ashamed to say that both my children knew Stalin before they knew Thomas the Tank Engine. Simon Sebag Montefiore Read Quote
She grounded me. I have become very disciplined now. I would never have written the books without her. Definitely the cleverest thing I ever did was to marry Santa. Maybe it’s the only clever thing I did. Simon Sebag Montefiore Read Quote
When I’m up, I’m over-exuberant; when I’m down, I just wander round on my own. I have no middle space. Simon Sebag Montefiore Read Quote
I love the flamboyance, the melodrama, the bloody theatre of Russian history. Simon Sebag Montefiore Read Quote
Writing fiction is very different to writing non-fiction. I love writing novels, but on history books, like my biographies of Stalin or Catherine the Great or Jerusalem, I spend endless hours doing vast amounts of research. But it ends up being based on the same principle as all writing about people: and that is curiosity! Simon Sebag Montefiore Read Quote
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. Simon Sebag Montefiore Read Quote
